Review: The Highwaymen is Netflix’s bland answer to a Bonnie and Clyde question that nobody asked GlobeArts
Merrick Morton/Netflix
There is a joke floating around certain corners of Twitter that the entertainment industry is only one White House administration away from producing a remake of– but this time recasting the heroes as the rednecks who kill Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s counterculture heroes.from the point of view of the lawmen who shot the pair to death, is this cynical gag brought to odious life.
Not to lionize the real, murderous deeds of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but are today’s audiences so belatedly morally enraged that there was a clamouring for a law-and-order corrective to Penn’s transgressive work? What’s more: If such a thing was necessary, why did the result have to be so dull? And despite its US$49-million price tag, why does it look like it cost a tenth of that?
These are questions that only Netflix, which snapped the title up after it was stuck in production hell inside Universal Pictures, can answer. Maybe the streaming service determined that a large portion of its audience consisted of dads. More specifically: dads of a certain age and conservative sensibility . These are the Netflix subscribers, I imagine, who only want to chill on a Sunday night while watching Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson shoot the breeze in-between shooting scoundrels.
There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism .is just an excuse for Netflix to stick it to Penn and the other mavericks who changed cinema, instead of just streaming it.
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