The Highwaymen (2019)
Directed by John Lee Hancock
No — The Highwaymen is not woke, scoring 18 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Highwaymen arrives with the sober demeanor of a case file and seems content to remain one.
Consciousness Markers
The film is explicitly a corrective retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde myth, reframing the celebrated outlaws as killers and rehabilitating Frank Hamer 'in the proper light of history' away from the romanticized popular narrative.
Occasional moralizing about the cost of the outlaw legend and the grimness of the work, but the film is largely a procedural and rarely stops to lecture.
There is mild commentary on the public's celebrity worship of outlaws and the refusal of an AP payout, but this is a moral note rather than an anti-capitalist thesis.
The cast is an overwhelmingly white ensemble of period-appropriate performers; no color-conscious or representational casting logic is applied to an all-white 1930s Texas setting.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the manhunt narrative.
The film centers two male Texas Rangers; female characters are peripheral and no feminist framing or critique of gender roles is present.
No engagement with race or racial justice; the story is entirely situated within a white rural-law-enforcement milieu.
No environmental or climate themes of any kind.
No body-positivity themes or depiction of diverse body types as a point of narrative interest.
Gault's alcoholism and declining faculties are treated as character flaws, not framed through a neurodivergence lens.
Why it received this score
The Highwaymen arrives with the sober demeanor of a case file and seems content to remain one. John Lee Hancock's film follows Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, two retired Texas Rangers coaxed back into service in 1934 to end the spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson play them as tired men doing tired work. The picture has no interest in the romance of the outlaw and even less in the romance of the lawman. It is a manhunt conducted on dirt roads, punctuated by coffee, cigarettes, and long silences in a sedan.
For a 2019 release, the film is remarkably free of the cultural signaling that has become standard practice. The cast is white, the setting is white rural Texas, and nothing in the film asks us to examine that arrangement. There is no gender critique, no queer subtext, no engagement with race, no environmental theme, and no attention to the body as a site of meaning. Kathy Bates appears as Governor Ma Ferguson, a historical figure, and the film treats her as one, which is to say, briefly. Gault's drinking is presented as a flaw and a liability, not as a condition awaiting a sympathetic frame.
The film's one substantive ideological move is historical correction. The screenwriter spent years researching to present Hamer in the proper light of history, and the screenplay accordingly strips the glamour from Bonnie and Clyde, showing them shooting officers and leaving bodies behind. A small economic grumble surfaces when Hamer refuses a thousand dollars from the Associated Press for an interview, a gesture against profiting from carnage, though it reads as personal honor instead of a thesis about capital. Now and then the film pauses to mourn the cost of the legend. Mostly it drives.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In 1934, Frank Hamer and Manny Gault, two former Texas Rangers, are commissioned to put an end to the wave of vicious crimes perpetrated by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, a notorious duo of infamous robbers and cold-blooded killers who nevertheless are worshiped by the public.
Questions about The Highwaymen
Is The Highwaymen woke?
No — The Highwaymen is not woke, scoring 18 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Highwaymen have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Revisionist History (45). On Revisionist History: The film is explicitly a corrective retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde myth, reframing the celebrated outlaws as killers and rehabilitating Frank Hamer 'in the proper light of history' away from the romanticized popular narrative.
How does The Highwaymen compare to other 2019 movies?
It ranks #122 of the 284 films from 2019 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Black Christmas (79).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.