The Highwaymen & The Professor and the Madman

So, thus far, 2019 has been quite the down year for films.  At the beginning of the second quarter, the best I can point to are Us and Captain Marvel, both of which I have some major issues with.  Hell, even Disney’s newest remake has fallen short of its already relatively meager estimates.  But the future could be bright, as Avengers: Endgame, The Wind, and the newest Godzilla movie have some potential for hope.  We’ll see.  Meanwhile, we seem to be awash in dull mediocrity.  Cases in point: The Highwaymen and The Professor and the Madman.

The films have some striking similarities:  Both are historic biopics about pairs of men, both feature some solid-ass casts (the former led by Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, and Kathy Bates; the latter by Mel Gibson, Natalie Dormer, and Sean Penn), and both fail to leave much in the way of impact in their wakes.

The Highwaymen follows a pair of former Texas Rangers (the law-enforcers, not the baseballers) plucked out of forced retirement to hunt down Bonnie and  Clyde.  They apparently succeed with their old-school methodologies and grit where the new feds and their fancy tech and such fail.  It’s a fine enough excuse to get Costner and Harrelson to engage in some cowboy-style antics, but it all falls extremely flat:  The digital cinematography provides little of interest or creativity to look at, often opting for the most basic lighting, staging, camera work, and editing, and the script is as rote as they come.  Clearly the filmmakers took plenty of inspiration from Public Enemies (especially with a watered-down version of the folksy music from that film, particularly Otis Taylor’s “Ten Million Slaves”), but none of Michael Mann’s skill or style looks to have rubbed off here.  Instead, the only noteworthy aspect is the constant refusal to show the criminals’ faces, and even this eventually starts to run into self-parody, reminding me of the censor-y ending to Austin Powers or the missing faces of the Muppet Babies’ Nanny and the Peanuts gang’s entire adult population.  Nothing truly new or interesting to see here.

Meanwhile, The Professor and the Madman tells the story of the arduous creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Mel Gibson’s back in the Scotch accent as James Murray, a self-taught linguistic whiz who undertakes to do in a handful of years what the rest of the stodgy scholarly world has failed to do for decades and compile a reference work for the whole of the English language.  What makes his scheme so plausible is his implementation of what is essentially a crowdsourcing campaign, soliciting submissions from every corner of the empire.  One such submitter, though, stands out: a former US soldier currently incarcerated in an asylum, who’s sending in thousands of entries.

A passion project of Gibson’s that took nearly two decades to get made, the film lacks much of the punch and verve that powered his previous efforts.  Murray isn’t nearly as interesting on the screen as he likely is on the page (if nothing else, this film did make me wanna read The Surgeon of Crowthorne), and he has nowhere near the presence of a Desmond Doss or a William Wallace (to obviously say nothing about Yeshua of Nazareth).  This might be due to Gibson’s absence from the director’s chair, but Farhad Safinia – whose conflicts with the studios led his name to be taken off of the film itself – does a well-enough impersonation to create the feeling of Gibson Light ™, so I’m left leaning toward a lackluster story that even some highly talented actors couldn’t quite elevate.  Though richer than The Highwaymen, the cinematography is still pretty dull, and the score does little to aid the narrative in any appreciable way, falling even short of the previous film’s ability to capture the time and setting of the action.

In both of these cases, the film isn’t truly bad or even worthy of extensive critique.  Rather, they’re just dull, lifeless, uninteresting.  This is how 2019 is shaping up thus far, providing little in the way of noteworthiness, be it good or bad, a trend that’s been foreshadowed for a while now, but one that finally seems to be hitting its lackadaisical stride.  Joy.