Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Someone either dies, or goes to Hell, or is otherwise handpicked to become a bounty hunter for—get this—escaped souls from the underworld. And he’s got to spend his days tracking down these demons at, on average, the pace of a monster per week, all while juggling his personal demons and interpersonal relationships. While I’d never dismiss a show like Prime Video’s new “The Bondsman” for running with an unoriginal idea (how many police procedurals do we have now?), the Blumhouse Television production’s biggest sin is how badly it wastes its premise and the movie star who deigned to headline it.
Longtime genre-heads might remember shows like ’90s cult one-season wonder “Brimstone,” with Peter Horton as a dead cop who had to bring 113 souls back to Hell. Or even CW’s Kevin Smith-penned “Reaper,” which introduced some fun slacker-comedy elements to the premise. “The Bondsman” lacks the kind of show-stopping character turns those shows gave folks (John Glover for the former, Tyler Labine and Ray Wise for the latter), opting instead for a sleepy, sloppy “Supernatural”-esque presentation that feels 20 years out of step.
Kevin Bacon (oh, poor Kevin) stars as Hub Halloran, a down on his luck bail bondsman who, in the opening minutes, gets his throat slit by a couple of brothers he’s been tracking down. Next thing he knows, he wakes back up, the deep gash along his esophagus is healing like crazy, and he has three claw marks pressed into his forearm. As his helpful handler Midge (Jolene Purdy) explains, he died, went to Hell, and has been spat back out to help old Scratch bring a few souls back who’ve jailbroken out of the big hot house down below. If he does it, his debt has been paid; forfeit, and he’s back down to Hell.
Creator Grainger David and showrunner Erik Oleson (“Carnival Row,” “The Man in the High Castle”) strain so hard to do something interesting with the concept; Hub is a bad guy, after all, whose anger issues and addiction to the job estranged him from his country singer ex-wife Maryann (Jennifer Nettles) and their young son, Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). (Doesn’t help, of course, that Maryann’s new boyfriend, Lucky Callahan [Damon Harrman], is undoubtedly behind the hit that killed Hub in the first place.) But as much as the show tries to fold the family drama into the show’s A-plot—predictably, the family get wrapped up in Hub’s criminal past and demon-hunting present—it just feels like so much dead air keeping you from the grisly delights “The Bondsman” is trying to present.
“Trying” being the operative word; for a show so seemingly committed to its Blumhouse horror bona fides, “The Bondsman” has a hard time making its demon fights seem, well, fun. There are a few scant set-pieces that offer some novelty, like a fight with a possessed teen influencer in an indoor swimming pool and the time Bacon gets to wield a flaming chainsaw. But apart from a few bursts of practical gore, “The Bondsman” is content to rest its laurels on some of the creakiest CGI I’ve seen on television. When “The X-Files” or “Supernatural” feel fresher and more up-to-date with their visual effects, you know you’ve got a problem.
There are a few bright spots, of course, with a couple of game performances trying to elevate the perfunctory, exposition-heavy (and joke-scarce) scripts. Bacon has had a helluva time trying to make a TV show stick in recent years: “I Love Dick,” “The Following,” “City on a Hill.” Here, there are glimmers of Val from “Tremors,” with his Southern drawl and aw-shucks we’ll-think-of-a-plan-later charm. Purdy also does a lot with a little as a beleaguered middle manager for Hell’s inscrutably corporate way of soul retrieval. But it’s Beth Grant as Hub’s mom, a tough-as-nails Christian woman who throws herself immediately into the role of sidekick, who gamely livens up the proceedings when the rest of the show can’t meet her level. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Grant trudge around action set-pieces wearing a tactical vest that reads “Momma Bear.”)
Granted, “The Bondsman”‘s eight thirty-minute episodes go down easy, and it’s a breeze to blow through it in an afternoon. But by the time you’re done, and the cheap-as-nails climax in the suburban Atlanta woods leads to the uninteresting cliffhanger for a second season, you’ll be left wondering whether you’d sell your soul to get that time back.
All episodes screened for review. Series streams April 3 on Prime Video.
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