Review: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson steer 'The Highwaymen' to nuanced destination

“The Highwaymen” — ★ ★ ★ ½

Outlaws Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow cast a long shadow in “The Highwaymen,” a new movie version of the story of how they robbed and killed their way through a large swath of the country in the early 1930s. Bonnie and Clyde loom large, but they are also largely invisible.

Although we see Bonnie (Emily Brobst) helping to orchestrate a jailbreak in one early scene, it is only from the back, and at a distance. Unlike the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, we hardly know what she or her partner-in-crime (Edward Bossert) even look like, until their violent end.

That's because “The Highwaymen,” an excellent and entertainingly old-fashioned police procedural about the case, isn't really about Bonnie and Clyde at all. Rather, it's the true story of the men who hunted them down: Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, played by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as a kind of twangy Holmes and Watson.

Costner and Harrelson are low-key fabulous as a pair of middle-aged former Texas Rangers, brought out of retirement and assigned to a special highway detail by the Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (played by a no-nonsense Kathy Bates in a role that deserves its own movie). With no jurisdiction outside their home state, Frank and Maney must bend the rules to follow their quarry.

In doing so, the film's heroes also run afoul of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (as the F.B.I. was then known), whose agents are depicted here as arrogant bumblers. Frank and Maney repeatedly put their federal colleagues to shame with little more than shoe-leather policing and their experience as manhunters.

Directed by John Lee Hancock from a serviceable and at times surprisingly sharp screenplay by John Fusco, “The Highwaymen” also grapples with fascinatingly contemporary themes.

In scenes in which Frank and Maney reminisce about their past adventures — including some where the notion of bending the law comes closer to breaking it — the issue of ethics in law enforcement is brought to the fore. Other echoes of today come from the ways in which Bonnie and Clyde use the media to cultivate a following.

Of course, Frank and Maney realize pretty quickly that they're probably not going to be able to take Bonnie and Clyde alive. In any other version of this story — especially one in which the bad guys are depicted as folk heroes — this realization would be hard to swallow, even accepting the fact that they're coldblooded murderers.

What's most interesting is that the word “highwayman” has a double meaning: It can refer both to the bandit and the person who patrols the roadway. Here, that ambiguity suffuses “The Highwaymen,” making what is otherwise a straightforward tale of cops and robbers, one in which the lines between good and evil are so sharply drawn, into a richly nuanced morality story.

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Starring: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert

Directed by: John Lee Hancock

Other: A Netflix release. In theaters March 22; streaming on Netflix March 29. Rated R for violence and smoking. 132 minutes