Highwaymen (2004)

Already car-hating Molly Poole (Rhona Mitra) barely escapes with her life from the attack of a serial killer we’ll later learn to be called Fargo (Colm Feore) – one of her friends is less happy. Fargo uses his souped-up car as murder weapon of choice, and really as a replacement body, for he is wheelchair-bound, which makes the while serial killing thing rather difficult. Given the car angle, nobody actually believes Molly’s story, and the police treat the situation as a bad case of a hit and run.

Well, nearly nobody believes her – a traffic investigator (Frankie Faison) has his doubts about the normalcy of the situation, and a mysterious man (Jim Caviezel before he lost his mind to QAnon) in his own souped-up car shadows her. Rennie, as we’ll mostly come to know him, lost his wife to the killer who attacked Molly and has been hunting him for years now, sharing the ways of the road and an occasional CB taunt/come-on with him.

Rennie is convinced Fargo is going to attack Molly again, and he’s not above using her as bait to finally get his man.

What a difference a decade and a half make. When I first (and last) saw Robert Harmon’s Highwaymen, I treated it as a less than successful attempt by Harmon to return to the glory days of his masterful The Hitcher, with the film at hand a slickly made yet basically empty attempt at catching lightning in a bottle a second time.

As is so often the case, I’m looking more than a little askance at my past self’s willingness to wave away a film that’s nearly as good as The Hitcher itself, a film which does indeed use elements of that past achievement as well as some taken from the mass of serial killer films that had accrued between the two movies. Where the old one is about a boy becoming a man/monster (interrogating the borderline between these two in a violent male-dominated society), this one takes place at a point where the protagonist’s innocence is already lost, and there’s only a difference in degree between him and his prey anymore.

So, this is a movie about men who have turned feral, roaming empty highways in cars that have become parts of their bodies – in the killer’s case even actual replacements for much of their bodies – performing a ritualised hunt Rennie uses to keep himself from ever having to actually process the death of his wife like a normal person would have to. In this context, it is no surprise he is only able to finish the hunt once he’s pressed into relating to Molly – and to a degree to investigator Macklin – as a person instead of a tool or an obstacle that doesn’t truly belong into Car World.

All of this is baked into a masterfully made thriller/action movie, a film of dark streets reflecting neon, the empty spaces between the places people actually inhabit, and seemingly endless nights. In fact, one of the best little tricks Harmon uses is the elegant shift from night to day for the film’s final stretch.

Basically, past me was an idiot. But that’s not news around here anymore.