Opinion | Jenni Miller: Netflix's 'The Highwaymen' reimagines Bonnie and Clyde as an overly simplistic hero cop story. - NBCNewsTHINK
“The Highwaymen” as a film suffers from some significant lags, especially since we all know how this story ends; what’s particularly interesting about the movie — besides Hamer’s inexplicable pet boar — is how it longs for a return to simpler times, when John Wayne was a hero and a man like Frank Hamer could go into a small-town store and buy enough guns to take down a small army without consequences.
As Hamer and Gault and their small crew close in on Bonnie and Clyde, one character shudders that a reporter asked him to get a photo of the couple after they’d been captured and presumably killed.the filmmakers seemingly want us to ask — even as they only show Bonnie and Clyde for the first time after their on-screen ends.
But of course we can: The movie will be streaming on Netflix with “Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” and the upcoming “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” two films by Joe Berlinger that have garnered considerable criticism for sexing up Ted Bundy. And the original “Bonnie and Clyde” was accused of being too violent and too sexy, with its glamorous stars and, not to mention the seemingly endless spray of bullets that penetrate their bodies at the climax of the film.
My tastes in true crime aren’t always highbrow: I’m not above a good Investigation Discovery special; while writing, I spent a number of minutes trying to find photos of Bonnie and Clyde’s murder scene; and I write about true crime podcasts every week. But the real meat of the genre is where the lines between good and evil begin to blur; the filmmakers here were seemingly so sure on which side of the line Hamer and Gault stood that they missed any opportunity to make the audience wonder.
Jenni Miller is a freelancer writer who covers movies, TV, sex, love, death, video games, and assorted weirdness for a variety of publications online and in print.
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