While the raids of Bonnie and Clyde rage for the United States, the Texas governor who dissolved the Rangers is persuaded to recall one of them on duty, to hunt down the two bandits who are now also two celebrities. Frank Hamer, who retired to private life in a beautiful villa, with a beautiful wife and a sort of domestic boar, agreed to return to action and sought help from another former ranger, Maney Gault. When he sees it, impoverished, brutalized and aged, he decides to let it go, but Gault traces it and the two form a pair of hunters determined to stop the two bandits and deeply annoyed by their fame.
Another side of the coin compared to Arthur Penn’s Gangster Story, which remains unapproachable. With its western tone, Highwaymen is a film that would like to be of other times, but ends up being simply reactionary.
The only touch of irony is an untranslatable play on the title, where ‘Highwaymen’ is a word that traditionally indicates bandits, while here it is used for the two agents forced to stand on the street, just like the couple to whom they give hunting. And in hunting it is in all respects with Hamer who first of all dedicates himself to the purchase of numerous weapons, including the automatic ones of that time. At this moment, which immediately explains the murderous intent of man, an entire scene is dedicated, so much so as to result in a provocation towards the proposals to regulate weapons in the United States by the Texas director John Lee Hancock.
The character played by Kevin Costner is also rich and even though he sees poverty around him, he does not seem to want to understand it at all, so he has no interest in understanding where Bonnie & Clyde is from or why they are such a popular phenomenon. For him they are just two murderers who have also killed lawyers and therefore, like hydrophobic dogs, they simply need to be killed. Moreover with the same brutality of which they are guilty, that is, riddling them as it is known of an infinite number of strokes, because in their turn this way they had killed some policemen. The law of retaliation therefore applies.