Film Reviews

Highwaymen

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Andrea Roth
• Details: US / 80 mins / (18).

Fresh (if that's the right word) from taking an almighty beating as Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, James Caviezel returns with Highwaymen. In a picture that's not too far removed (but infinitely inferior) from Gibson's own breakthrough movie, Mad Max. Here Caviezel plays Rennie Cray, a man whose wife is killed in a hit and run. Devastated by his loss, Cray learns that his missus was actually murdered by wheelchair-bound nutter Fargo (Feore, far too classy for this nonsense), a man who has customised his car into a killing machine. Understandably aggrieved by this development, Cray adapts his own motor - a Plymouth Barracuda apparently - and sets out on a mission to find Fargo and exact a bitter revenge. Along the way, he picks up Molly (the foxy Rhona Mitra), a love interest masquerading as a character, who has also suffered at the wheels of Fargo.
So ridiculous that even the star here appears to be embarrassed at shaming his CV, Highwaymen is a film in search of a decent premise. Abandoning the atmospherics and sense of dread which characterised his most famous work, The Hitcher, director Robert Harmon saturates the audience in needless levels of violence, bypassing any semblance of order or plausibility as he documents the carnage with a giddy, vaguely disturbing, enthusiasm. Rent out Road Kill instead.

Review by Garreth Murphy