February 13, 2004 | To paraphrase Jim Morrison: There’s a killer on the road… again. Back in 1986, director Robert Harmon unleashed The Hitcher , his cult-fave shocker about a thumb-tripping, throat-slitting psycho played by Rutger Hauer. Now Harmon is back to put the pedal to the metal once more with Highwaymen , a new road-kill thriller that’s slicker and subtler – more clammy suspense, less graphic carnage — and just plain scarier than its hell-on-wheels predecessor.
Jim Caviezel ( Frequency ) stars to haunted, hollow-eyed perfection as Rennie Cray, a doctor whose beloved wife was murdered before his eyes by James Fargo (Colm Feore), a thrill-killing hit-and-run driver. At the time, Cray sought vengeance by ramming his own car into Fargo’s. Unfortunately, the killer survived the crash – and lived to kill and kill again. Which is why, when we catch up with Cray after the jolting prologue, he is relentlessly motoring around the country in his souped-up ’68 Plymouth Barracuda, obsessively seeking a second chance to extract revenge.
The smash-up left Fargo wheelchair-bound and reliant on prosthetics, but you can’t keep a bad man down. Even as Cray doggedly pursues him, the cyborg-like serial killer continues to claim new victims while steering his lethal weapon of choice, a ’72 Cadillac Eldorado. But wait, there’s more: Increasingly ambitious and perversely ingenious in his steadily escalating mayhem, Fargo has graduated from running over helpless women to staging multiple-vehicle disasters.
Choir singer Molly Poole (Rhonda Mitra) is the sole survivor of a massive pile-up Fargo causes in a highway tunnel. Questioned by traffic investigator Will Macklin (Frankie Faison), she recounts how her best friend was taunted, then terminated, by the unseen driver of the killer Caddie. Mackin is sympathetic, yet skeptical. But Cray has no trouble believing Molly. And he has no scruples about using her as bait to catch his quarry.
In the lead role, Caviezel offers a subdued yet profoundly spooked-out performance that is a textbook example of eloquent underplaying. Indeed, on the few occasions when he does raise his voice, the sound has the in-context impact of a thunderclap. (Thanks to a freakish coincidence of release dates, Caviezel soon will be seen as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ . It’s more than likely that, in that movie, he’ll come off as a more forgiving figure.)
Working from a script by Craig Mitchell and Hans Bauer, director Harmon delivers an edgy and unsettling thriller that takes a pared-to-essentials approach to delineating characters and establishing motives. There is a borderline-abstract, almost pop-mythic quality to the good-versus-evil narrative, and an overall sense of classic archetypes and conventions at play. Many of the moodily-lit settings – gone-to-seed motels, auto junkyards, abandoned garages – suggest a heightened realism that skirts close to expressionism.
On a less highfalutin level, there’s also a hint of wink-wink self-parody to Harmon’s cheeky tweaks of thriller-movie clichés. Somebody cops to a chronic inability to drive, and somebody else admits to having never fired a gun. So, of course, when crunch time comes, the car-phobic character takes the wheel, the gun-shy character pulls the trigger — and the audience is enormously pleased by both pay-offs. Better still, Harmon saves his most audacious touch for the very end: Breezily disdaining the financial incentive for a sequel-friendly conclusion, he provides an entirely satisfying climax that more or less ensures there can never be a Highwaymen II: On the Road Again .
