Director – Robert Harmon, Screenplay – Hans Bauer & Craig Mitchell, Producers – Brad Jenkel, Carroll Kemp, Avi Lerner & Mike Marcus, Photography – Rene Ohashi, Music – Mark Isham, Visual Effects Supervisor – Lubo Hristov, Visual Effects – Cinesite & Pacific Title (Supervisor – Mark Freund), Special Effects – Laird McMurray Film Services Inc., Makeup Effects/Prosthetics – Sean Sansom, Production Design – Paul Austerbery. Production Company – New Line Cinema/Millennium Films/Cornice Entertainment.
Cast
Jim Caviezel (James ‘Rennie’ Cray), Rhona Mitra (Molly Poole), Frankie Faison (Will Macklin), Colm Feore (Fargo), Gordon Currie (Ray Boone), Andrea Roth (Alexandra Farrow), James Kee (Trauma Counselor), Guylaine St. Onge (Olivia Cray)
Plot
Molly Poole is being driven home by her friend Alexandra Farrow when they crash in a tunnel. Molly gets out of the car only to see a driver in a Cadillac Eldorado run Alexandra over. The driver then takes a photograph of Molly before fleeing. Afterwards Molly is found at a trauma support group by Rennie who warns her that the driver of the Cadillac takes trophies and will be coming back for her. He is proven right when the killer attacks the car Molly is being driven home in that night, but Rennie appears and saves her. The killer Fargo taunts Rennie via cb radio saying he will be returning for both of them tomorrow. Rennie explains to Molly that Fargo targets women all across the country, striking them in hit-and-run accidents. Rennie’s wife Olivia was killed, before Rennie hospitalised Fargo in revenge. The two have now been engaging in a cat and mouse game as Rennie traces Fargo across country. Rennie wants to use Molly as bait but doing so means Molly having to face her fears and getting back in the car.
The Hitcher (1986) from director Robert Harmon is in my opinion one of the great horror films of the 1980s and does not nearly get as much recognition as it should. It was a modest hit in its day and Harmon’s name acclaimed. The surprise is that Harmon failed to ever go on to do anything of significance again. He made a couple of other negligible films with the insipid John Travolta vehicle Eyes of an Angel (1991) about a man and his dog pursued by the mob, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Nowhere to Run (1990) and the forgettable horror film They (2002), then lapsed into the tv wasteland.
I remember seeing Highwaymen on video/dvd shelves when it came out but for whatever reason never got around to checking out. Now, twenty years after it came out, I had the opportunity to do so. I wish I had done so earlier as it is easily Harmon’s second best film. (Although the plus of waiting is that one can see it in beautiful dvd restoration on a widescreen whereas doing so on video back in its day would have robbed it of much). Highwaymen can be considered a successor to The Hitcher in a number of ways, particularly in that it returns to the same theme of a cat and mouse game between an innocent victim and a fiendish killer that plays out across the desert backroads.
Highwaymen isn’t quite The Hitcher 2 but Robert Harmon nevertheless impresses in many places. It is often a very nicely photographed film with Harmon staging some great night-time-shot scenes. There are some spectacular set-pieces – the crash in the underpass with a toppling truck-trailer; and in particular the scene where Fargo crashes into the car where Rhona Mitra is being driven by Gordon Currie where their car is overturned and then hooked by Fargo and dragged upside down on its roof in a trail of sparks at the same time as Jim Caviezel drives up and attempts to affect a rescue of Rhona by getting her to surf along on a torn-off door and jump over into his car.
Jim Caviezel hunts the backroads seeking justiceRhona Mitra fights off the psychopathic Fargo (Colm Feore)
If anything, Highwaymen feels almost like a combination of The Hitcher and a motorised Moby Dick (1851) with Jim Caviezel as an Ahab figure obsessively hunting Colm Feore as the equivalent of the whale. Or perhaps the motorist vs shadowy driver in Duel (1971) but where Dennis Weaver becomes a lot more proactive and starts hunting the truck driver back, and with the addition of a girl in the midst.
The latter half of the film makes the cat-and-mouse game between Jim Caviezel’s singularly determined avenger and the unique figure of Colm Feore’s motorised psycho into a fascinating game of psychological manoeuvring. Most unique is the transformation of Colm Feore into something approaching a comic-book villain who is crippled and deformed by his accident and uses his car as an extension of his body – “he is his car,” Jim Caviezel comments.
The IMDB reports that the full version of the film runs to 125 minutes, although this was edited down to 80 minutes for theatrical release. It is this cut version that remains in dvd release today. Highwaymen is one film that would well benefit a restored director’s cut.
