Dateline: Austin, Texas – A BRAND-NEW MOVIE TAKES ON a beloved 52-year old classic. That notion was enough to pique my interest.

And sure enough, I settled in for a determined contest of purpose. I was at the legendary, and beautiful, Paramount Theater where most of the South By South-West movie festival’s world-premieres take place, amid wholly appropriate anticipation and hulllaballoo.   Director John Lee Hancock, noted for the likes of Saving Mr Banks and The Blind Side was introducing his latest production, The Highwaymen, and he explained right away that he’d been motivated to make it as a corrective to a calumny.

One man featured in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde (below right), the ex-Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who hunted down the title characters, had been in Hancock’s view, so unfairly misrepresented during director Arthur Penn’s glossy paean to the late-60’s anti-establishment zeitgeist, that the present-day director felt restitution had to be made. Hence The Highwayman – in which Hancock cast Kevin Costner as Hamer, and as a bonus had Woody Harrelson (since the story lends itself easily to buddy-movie conventions) playing Hamer’s sidekick, his fellow former-Ranger Manny Gault.

The movie opens in 1934 with the renowned, indeed publicity-loving, bank-robbers Bonnie and Clyde dramatically aiding an escape by their gang-members from a Texas prison farm. Their success, murderous as it turns out to be, sets in motion their nemeses.

The state’s Department of Corrections persuades the Governor – the redoubtable Governor Miriam Amanda “Ma” Ferguson, successor, after his impeachment, to her husband James ”Pa” Ferguson – to discreetly reactivate at least one small part of the recently-disbanded Rangers. Never let it be said, by the way, that Texas state politics are not colorful. (The film rather glides over just why “Ma” (played here enjoyably by Kathy Bates) had disbanded them – one contributing reason was that they’d gotten politicized, and rather foolishly, perhaps, had publicly supported her rival for office.)

Some official ‘spinning’ of the hunters’ real provenance results in the ‘Highwaymen’ of the film’s title – the ex-Rangers could just feasibly be part of the state’s Highway Patrol – and indeed part of their mission had become avenging Bonnie and Clyde’s murder of two motorcycle Patrolmen.

WITH A DELIBERATENESS that veers toward plodding, the Depression background to the story gets fully painted in – with farms and houses under bank foreclosure … smoky and muddy Hooverville encampments … families and their sparse furniture and belongings piled up on westward-heading trucks. But along with all this come caricatured snapshots of a populace besotted with Bonnie and Clyde as folk-heroes (hysterically mobbing their car, for instance, when the couple appears in a new town). More convincingly depicted is the general, sullen lack of public cooperation that the Rangers encounter while conducting their search – any representative of authority or ‘law and order’, especially if its role is to defend banks, won’t get any help from these beaten-down citizens.

Very deliberately again, Bonnie and Clyde themselves are not seen. Except, that is, in cryptic, partial imagery: a rakish man’s semi-brogue shoe in ‘Spectator’ style, a woman’s silhouette in a tailored suit with nipped-in waist, seen only from behind and accessorized with a Thompson submachine gun (the pair were noted for their fancy clothes, after all).

All that possibly glamorous mystery is decisively demolished in the infamous hail of bullets from Hamer, Gault and their small posse when they ambush the couple on Highway 154 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana – an ambush that Hancock has reenacted at the historically accurate spot.  And now, as they are killed – we suddenly see both Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow full-on – and they turn out to be “just two scrawny, unexceptional kids”, in Hancock’s own description.

The 1967 film’s climactic scene presenting those deaths had its own shock value in its time – an early use on film of explosive ‘squibs’ coupled with capsules of theatrical ‘blood’ – and its graphic realism created a powerful contrast with the previous antic escapades of the “beautiful young lovers”, as the movie’s star – and producer – Warren Beatty once called himself and Faye Dunaway.

There are obvious and inevitable parallels between that scene and Hancock’s version, but if his purpose overall with the film was indeed to elevate Ranger Hamer’s reputation to what it deserves to be, I’m not at all sure he succeeded. When the fusillade finally stops, Costner’s silent, heavy-lidded surveying of the resulting bloody tableau communicates a far from uplifting conclusion: there are no heroes here.