Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Highwaymen’ On Netflix, Where Kevin Costner And Woody Harrelson Play The Grizzled Rangers That Killed Bonnie And Clyde

Many people know the story of Bonnie and Clyde; the young couple laid waste to much of the middle of the country in the peak years of the Depression before being shot to death on a Louisiana road in 1934. But do you know anything about the two former Texas Rangers who finally caught them? The Highwaymen has Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson playing those men. Is it worth watching?

THE HIGHWAYMEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1934 in Texas, and two young bandits, Bonnie Parker (Emily Brobst) and Clyde Barrow (Edward Bossert) are leaving a massive body count up and down the middle of the country, and most of those bodies are law enforcement officers. In the opening of The Highwaymen, we see the couple, or at least parts of them, pull off a prison escape, despite the fact that they’re outnumbered by guards. They’re not only armed to the teeth with machine guns, but they’re also extremely difficult to catch, despite the massive manhunt by the FBI and other entities.

After the prison break, Texas governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates) gets heat from the press that Bonnie and Clyde and their crew haven’t yet been caught, and she demands a solution. Her chief of prisons, Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), has a solution: Bring their two best Texas Rangers out of retirement and give them free reign to find and kill the couple. Despite ending the Rangers program over the fact that they answered to no one, Ferguson agrees, hoping that Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) aren’t the ones who catch Bonnie and Clyde, because that would mean her modern police force didn’t.

Hamer, egged on by Simmons and the deadly antics of Bonnie and Clyde, accepts the job as a “highwayman” (remember, the Rangers no longer exist), over the objections of his wife Gladys (Kim Hamer), and goes looking for Gault. He spies Gault on his family farm, hobbling along with his grandson, and at first turns away. But when Gault finds him, the two of them set out to find Bonnie and Clyde, despite the younger agents with more up-to-date experience wondering why they’re there and just thinking that they’re getting in the way.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, it’s pretty much the opposite side of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, so you can marry that period piece with something like Grumpy Old Men and you’ve got The Highwaymen. Lots of lines about how much Gault pees and how they can’t chase people anymore due to the fact that they’re old guys.

Performance Worth Watching: Harrelson has the meatier role as Gault, who is trying to piece his life back together after retiring from the Rangers, having to deal with the people he killed in his old job but also wanting to prove that he’s got something left to give. Not that Costner isn’t good, but we’ve seen him do a lot of “stoic, weathered guy who’s seen it all” roles lately (Hatfields & McCoys, Yellowstone).

Memorable Dialogue: While Hamer, Gault and the team they’ve put together wait in a bungalow for when Bonnie and Clyde will drive out of the Louisiana town where they’ve hid out for the past few days, everyone but Hamer play poker. When one of the younger members of the crew ask about Hamer and Gualt’s salad days, Gault launches into a monologue about the time they killed over 50 members of a Mexican gang in less than five minutes. He says about Hamer, “Cap sat on a rock, holstered his gun, and said, ‘Manos arribas, you sons of bitches.”

Single Best Shot: A massive crowd pulls at the bloodied bodies of Bonnie and Clyde as their bullet-ridden car is towed into town, showing how popular the bandits were with the general public.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Our Take: Written by John Fusco (Young Guns) and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), there’s a lot more to The Highwaymen than we discussed in the Gist section. But, given that this is the story about the grizzled vets who finally get Bonnie and Clyde and not about the bandits themselves, there isn’t much else to say about it. It’s a slow-moving film without a ton of action. We essentially spend the better part of 132 minutes watching Costner and Harrelson mutter about the case, crack wise about how fugitives operate, and debate the merits of what they did for a living. Oh, and we see Harrelson pee a lot.

Listen, it was a good thought to finally have a film about Hamer and Gault, showing the side of the Bonnie and Clyde story that wasn’t glamorous, that involved good old-fashioned police work to catch the two notorious bandits. But it doesn’t make for particularly interesting storytelling, especially when most of the film is more or less a buddy film between two grouchy oldsters.

There were aspects we would have liked to explore, like Hamer’s relationship with his wife, who basically disappeared after she lent him her brand new Ford to chase down Bonnie and Clyde. Or maybe we could have seen more about Hamer’s reluctance to get back in the game or Gault’s conflict about killing people but wanting to engage with life and catching bad guys again. Heck, there was more story to explore with Ma Ferguson, the first female governor of Texas, and why she disbanded the Rangers.

But Fusco and Hancock decided to let Costner and Harrelson carry the load, and the film meanders because of it. Since we know what the ending is going to be, the journey in this film has to be interesting, and it just isn’t, despite fine performances by Costner and Harrelson.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Watch Bonnie and Clyde instead to see Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at their peak, and the first role of Gene Hackman’s amazing late ’60s/early ’70s run. The Highwaymen tells the boring side of that story in a very boring way.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream The Highwaymen on Netflix