Netflix’s Reactionary Take On Bonnie Clyde

In one of many first scenes in The Highwaymen, Bonnie Parker limps as much as a wounded cop who lays dying and plugs him within the head at level clean vary for good measure. The younger freeway patrolman was engaged to be married on the time, his fiancee wore her marriage ceremony gown to his funeral, and the general public outcry over the story was a significant component in turning public opinion towards Bonnie and Clyde.

Trouble is, it didn’t really occur. At least not in line with Jeff Guinn’s biography of the couple, which says it was Barrow gangmember Henry Methwin who delivered the additional photographs, after beginning the shootout within the first place when the police approached the gang and Methwin misunderstood Barrow’s directive, “I guess we have to take them now.” (Barrow had beforehand solely kidnapped police when cornered, not killed them).

You may definitely make the case that Clyde Barrow was a cop killer (he undoubtedly killed cops) and that Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, performed by Kevin Costner in The Highwaymen, deserved higher than his bungling depiction in 1967’s Best Picture nominated Bonnie And Clyde. This was, in any case, a person whose considerably controversial legacy at the least included making an attempt to take down the KKK and stopping numerous lynchings lengthy even earlier than he bought concerned with Bonnie and Clyde. There’s lots within the document to help that view, of hero Hamer and villain Bonnie and Clyde, which appears to be The Highwaymen‘s (directed by John Lee Hancock and written by John Fusco) cause for being.

So why cheat? The Highwaymen, starring Costner as Hamer and Woody Harrelson as BM “Manny” Gault (I can’t cease laughing at the truth that the man’s title was “BM”) definitely desires to be the dads rule, punks drool tackle the manhunt for Bonnie and Clyde, the place all of the lib justifications for his or her criminality — they have been born into poverty, the cops have been all the time selecting on them, banks have been predatory, it was the melancholy, there have been no jobs, and so forth. and so forth. — are waved away with “but they broke the law!” At one level Harrelson’s character mutters to Costner’s, about Bonnie and Clyde’s burgeoning superstar, “I keep in mind while you needed to really do one thing to be well-known.”

But the truth that The Highwaymen can’t ship its theoretically truthful perspective on the fabric with out fixed exaggerations and open dad pandering simply makes it really feel that rather more like crotchety reactionism.