**No Spoilers**

The Highwaymen (2019), starring Kevin Costner as Frank Hamer and Woody Harrelson as Many Gault, is a movie set in the year 1934, during the reign of Bonnie and Clyde. This movie, directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), gives us the point of view of two men that managed to make history by finally ending the terror of two of the most infamous outlaws who ever existed. Frank Hamer and Many Gault are former Texas Rangers, ones who earned themselves quite the reputation during the time Governor “ Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates), disbanded the Texas Rangers after they were found to be too troublesome for the government.

When the movie opens, Bonnie and Clyde are breaking into a prison, which puts Ma between a rock and a hard place. Rather reluctantly, and at the encouragement of her Corrections Chief Lee Simmons (John Caroll Lynch), she allows the two to do one last shindig and this is where our movie begins.

The story follows Hamer and Gault as they track the “beloved” outlaws and bring them to justice. Throughout the movie, they are constantly met by the Federal Investigators Ma ordered to follow them (to make sure that she could keep the Texas Rangers disbanded), and have to deal with the impoverished and devoted public that don’t want to see their modern day Robin Hoods taken down. Because this is a spoiler free review, that’s about all I can say because, to be honest, that’s really all there is to it. This brings me to my thoughts.

First the positives. This movie gave a really nice perspective to the Bonnie and Clyde story. The Highwaymen does a great job of humanizing the two, showing you bits and pieces of their lives before they started breaking the law. There are quite a few scenes where you see Hamer and Gault deal with these realities knowing the task that lays before them. Also, Harrelson and Costner make a really good duo. Their chemistry was really great on screen, and the two of them made something that could have been incredibly tedious much more palatable. Their characters brought a complexity to a somewhat linear storyline. I appreciated them greatly.

The negatives. This movie was monotonous. This was pretty frustrating because I feel like they missed out on really driving home the shock factor of why Bonnie and Clyde needed to be brought down. Yes we hear of a few things that they’ve done, and none of them sound great, but they seem like only shadows compared to the true reputation they had made in real life. It just fell short for me. They spent a lot of time showing you “Hey, they were young once”, or “Hey, this was where they grew up”, or “people like them because of this”, but the same “details”, if you can call them that, weren’t given about their crime spree. That is, with the exception of the police that they had killed.

Because this is from The Law’s perspective, you get to feel a lot of the weight from the damage Bonnie and Clyde caused to law enforcers with a few pedestrians scattered here or there. I get that as law enforcers this would be a pretty huge deal to Hamer and Gault, however, they could’ve put the same weight on the death of pedestrians. It just felt a little lopsided to me. The theme of my complaints are that there just wasn’t enough detail, on either side or in either direction, to really invest you into any of the characters. The most detail you got was how they had become celebrities and how large their following had become. I wanted to be invested in the cause, I wanted to be invested into the characters, but there was just not enough to grab onto. Again, I appreciated the perspective of the movie, I liked the casting of the two main characters, I even enjoyed the cinematography of the movie, it just left me wanting so much more.

I give The Highwaymen a 2.5 out of 5. It’s a good movie to watch if you’re all caught up on your shows and watch list; but if you’re like me, it certainly won’t make the rewatch list.

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