The Highwaymen: A Salute to the Real Lawmen Behind the Legend
The Highwaymen, John Lee Hancock’s quiet but potent 2019 film, reclaims the Bonnie and Clyde narrative from its long-held glamorization. Instead of celebrating the infamous outlaws as tragic rebels, it restores the spotlight to the two men who brought their bloody rampage to an end: Frank Hamer and Maney Gault. With remarkable restraint and sincerity, the film is a meditation on justice, trauma, and duty in an America grappling with change. It is also a tribute—not just to Hamer and Gault, but to the forgotten ethos of the lawman: competent, quiet, and burdened by the weight of moral responsibility.
This film comes as a direct counterweight to Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, a cultural phenomenon of its era. The earlier film starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in roles that mythologized the killers as misunderstood antiheroes. That version thrilled audiences with stylized violence, fast cars, and doomed romance, capturing the rebellious zeitgeist of 1960s America. But in doing so, it obscured the harsh reality: Bonnie and Clyde were not folk heroes, but murderers who left a trail of bodies across the America.
The Highwaymen seeks to correct that lens. Kevin Costner’s Frank Hamer is no caricature of virtue; he is a man weathered by years of violence and service. When Governor Ma Ferguson pulls him from retirement, he doesn’t leap at the call. But duty, real and unshakeable, drives him forward. His sense of responsibility—not vengeance, not glory—is what brings him back to the hunt.
Hamer’s firearm purchases illustrate the same unromantic professionalism. A Colt 1911, Smith & Wesson 1917 revolver, BAR, Colt Monitor, scoped 1903 rifle, Remington 11 shotgun, and a Thompson submachine gun. Not props for a cinematic showdown, but tools carefully chosen by a man who has faced lethal violence before and expects it again. His readiness is not obsessive; it is methodical. Many modern officers—often dismissed as “gun nuts”—will recognize this mentality. To be unprepared is a sin in their world.
Woody Harrelson’s Maney Gault, in contrast, is bruised by a life that no longer fits him. Scarred by trauma, jobless due to the Great Depression, Gault clings to the only identity he understands: that of a lawman. He now lives with his daughter, unemployed and quietly ashamed. In one quiet, telling moment, he waits for her to leave so he can slip his modest meal to his grandson, ensuring the boy has enough to eat. It is not fire and brimstone, but this, too, is Hell—a place of guilt, helplessness, and quiet despair. Earlier, his grandson repeats a schoolyard judgment: Gault might go to Hell for the people he’d killed. But the irony is plain—he already has. The justice he served has left him not damned in the afterlife, but diminished in this one. Justice often extracts a price, and for Gault, that toll is paid daily in silence.
Initially reluctant to bring Gault on, Hamer sits in silence outside Gault’s home, watching the man navigate a world that no longer needs him. But Gault forces his way back into the mission. Not to relive old glories, but because he can’t sit idle while evil runs free. His rejoining Hamer isn’t a narrative convenience—it’s a lifeline to meaning, to redemption.
Their chemistry becomes the engine of the story. Both men operate outside the bureaucracy of modernizing law enforcement. While federal agents collect shell casings and tabulate crime stats, Hamer and Gault follow leads and chase shadows. They know that criminals don’t fear institutions—they fear men who won’t quit. The film makes a compelling argument: sometimes, justice isn’t about process. It’s about persistence.
In the climactic ambush, Hamer commands Gault to stay off the road. But Gault steps forward anyway, unable to let his partner stand alone. What follows is a withering fusillade of gunfire, brutally ending Bonnie and Clyde’s spree. It’s not played for thrills. It’s a necessary end to an evil that would not stop.
And this is where The Highwaymen intersects with another American icon: Dirty Harry. Released in 1971, just four years after Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry was Hollywood’s stylized counterpunch to the romanticism of criminal rebellion. While the 1967 film cast Bonnie and Clyde as glamorous antiheroes, Dirty Harry reasserted the necessity of moral clarity and decisive action. Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Callahan served as a cinematic placeholder for real men like Frank Hamer and Maney Gault—figures whose stories had been largely forgotten. In the absence of their legacy, Callahan stood in as a mythic echo of the lawman who acts when others won’t. He was forged in the same mold: resolute, unyielding, and shaped by a world that required hard men to stop harder threats. Dirty Harry is not just a character—he is the stylized shadow of Hamer and Gault, carrying forward their ethos until the truth could catch up.
In Dirty Harry, the system fails. In The Highwaymen, the system isn’t even trying. Both films affirm a harsh truth: justice often depends on individuals willing to carry its weight alone. Hamer and Gault went across state lines to track and destroy two criminals who had baffled and terrified a nation. They didn’t talk about justice. They executed it.
One particularly haunting moment comes when Gault confesses the truth about Candelaria. Despite issuing repeated commands to surrender, he and his fellow Rangers were met with deadly resistance. They responded not with mercy, but with firepower. The trauma of those decisions lingers in Gault’s eyes, but the message is clear: there are moments when hesitation means death.
This ethos echoes in many modern officers who persist despite the emotional scars, public scrutiny, and political hostility. They remain not because the job is easy, but because they know few others can do it. Like Gault, some carry past traumas. Like Hamer, many rely on experience forged in hard realities. Together, they uphold a thin blue line most will never fully understand.
When Hamer says, “I’m real glad you’re here,” it is more than sentiment. It is the purest expression of trust that one warrior can give another. Their camaraderie is forged in fire and consequence—a brotherhood not of convenience but of character.
The ambush itself is delivered with chilling precision. Hidden along a remote Louisiana backroad, Hamer and Gault wait in silence alongside local lawmen. The stillness breaks only when Bonnie and Clyde arrive, unsuspecting. In that moment, the tension gives way to pure action—not stylized, not heroic, but cold, necessary violence. The lawmen unleash a torrent of gunfire, overwhelming the outlaws in seconds. There is no satisfaction in their expressions, no exultation in the kill—only grim relief. It is justice as finality, carried out by men who understood the weight of what they were doing and accepted the burden without flinching.
The Highwaymen is not just a historical correction. It is a cultural course adjustment. It strips away the rebellious glamor of the 1967 film and reminds us that Bonnie and Clyde were not misunderstood. They were monsters. And the men who stopped them were not bloodthirsty executioners. They were the last line of defense in a lawless time.
In a world that often questions the morality of force, The Highwaymen reminds us of its necessity. Justice is not always neat. It is not always pretty. But when wielded by men of conscience, it is necessary. And those who carry that burden deserve to be remembered not as relics, but as guardians.
Hamer and Gault remind us that sometimes the world doesn’t need a committee or a commission—it needs two old lawmen and an unusually large amount of firepower.
