By John Cote
When people think of Bonnie and Clyde they think of a bank-robbing couple, bullets flying, tommy guns blar- ing, and lots of blood. Unfortunately “Bonnie and Clyde” (2013) on Netflix does not live up to that expectation. There are few movies on Netflix that hold the title “Emmy award winning” or “Oscar-nominated film” and “Bonnie and Clyde” is not one of those films. From its incredibly long runtime of boring scenes to its flaw in narration and reality, the film is full of mistakes that I guess the director just didn’t care about.
This movie has a runtime of nearly three hours, two hours and fifty-four minutes to be exact, but every minute feels like ten of boring plot build up.
When the movie does kick up it skips through all the bank robbing and shootout scenes almost completely. What good is making a movie based on the two most fa- mous bank robbing duo if you are not going to show them robbing banks?
The movie tries to focus on the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde but instead it seems like a rushed time- line of them on the run forever and not much relationship building or anything to make the audience remotely at- tached to the famous crooks.
The movie literally took all the hype out of Bonnie and Clyde and tried to make it just a love story but failed completely by not adding enough content even for that aspect. It makes you wonder how the film even has that long of a runtime without delivering much content.
The answer is the film gives too little of too much, little pieces of story lines not followed enough to build interest. The film spends quite a reasonable amount of time showing how crazy Bonnie really is with her collection of snippets of newspapers and sending journalists better pictures of her to use in the paper. Bonnie collects these mementos and keeps them in a wooden crate, which Clyde burns in an anticlimactic scene and Bonnie just accepts the fact that years-worth of history she collected was just burned in front of her very eyes.
The story is also narrated by Clyde, which doesn’t make much sense considering the first scene of the movie is him being filled with bullets. The movie uses this narration to try and establish an emotional connection to Clyde as it also gives a very lengthy background story for him. The movie makes it seem like Clyde never really wanted to rob all those banks and shoot people and that it was Bonnie that made him become a criminal mastermind.
Another flaw in the film, besides the drawn out incomplete scenes, was the fact that it was not realistic when it came to the very few bullet flying scenes. Clyde’s brother was shot right in the back of the head and somehow manages to live for another gunfight later. Clyde “walked two miles to town” according to Bonnie, and brought back ice and bandages.
Ice reduced the swelling and I guess the bandages were magic because they just wrapped his head and all of a sudden he didn’t just have a bullet go straight through his brain. Yea right. Clyde also receives multiple shots to the arm and somehow manages to use still use it to open doors and drive.
Overall the film was a very long drama about the story of a crazy girl who tricked a slightly criminal inclined man to committing hundreds of robberies just so she could be- come famous and have her name remembered. At the end, right before they get shot multiple times, Clyde looks at Bonnie and says “I always loved you Bonnie”, and she just stares back at him. Not a single word for the three minutes before their death. No ‘I love you too Clyde’ or ‘we were meant to be together’, just a blank guilty stare.
