‘The Bondsman’ Review: A Bloody Good Kevin Bacon Leads Amazon’s Uneven Horror Dramedy

To the uneven extent that Amazon’s The Bondsman works, it’s thanks primarily to Kevin Bacon’s effortlessly winning lead turn as Hub Halloran, the titular country musician turned bounty hunter turned undead demon killer.

The star is able to land the show’s humor with a well-timed grunt, and its emotions with the perfect hangdog expression. He looks damn cool when he’s lighting up monsters with his trusty shotgun, but also slightly, endearingly pathetic when he’s not. Such is his charisma that he’s nearly able to make this whole strange jumble of tones and tunes and supernatural gore sing, through sheer force of will.

Nearly, that is, but not quite. Outside of Bacon’s performance, the horror dramedy is more of a mixed bag — fitfully amusing but rarely as funny or heartfelt or surprising as it wants to be, and never as memorable as its attention-grabbing premise might lead you to hope.

In retrospect, it’s telling that the most entertained I felt during the premiere was during the “this season on” sizzle reel. Creator Grainger David’s premise is most promising on paper, at least if you’re a fan of gory supernatural hijinks: After Hub is murdered one night, he’s resurrected and pressed into service as a bondsman for the Devil, hunting down the demons that keep making their way to the sleepy rural hamlet of Landry, Georgia.

This literal new lease on life not only keeps Hub out of Hell, for now, it provides an opportunity for him to right some of his wrongs here on Earth. Chief among those are the stubbornness, hot-headedness and resentful pride that drove away Maryanne (The Righteous Gemstones’ Jennifer Nettles), his ex-wife and erstwhile performing partner, and their teenage son, Cade (Maxwell Jenkins).

But there’s also the matter of the mysterious something he did to get sentenced to eternal damnation in the first place, despite otherwise seeming like a garden-variety screwup — flawed, as his own doting mother (Beth Grant’s Kitty) readily admits, but hardly evil.

Perhaps fittingly for a series produced by horror outlet Blumhouse, The Bondsman seems most comfortable embracing the gruesomeness of its premise. The throat injury that ends Hub’s life the first time is no tidy little slash but a wet and jagged hole so big that when Hub puffs on a cigarette, smoke comes flying out of it, à la Sylvia Sidney in Beetlejuice.

Elsewhere, we’re treated to mangled fingers and severed limbs, to heads smashed in or ripped apart, to intestines spilling from a burst torso. While not especially scary, the series loves a gory special effect, and it delivers blood and viscera by the bucketful.

Less assured, however, is the execution of the material around those horrors. The Bondsman builds its emotional arc around the idea of atonement, as Hub tries and mostly fails to become the man his family needs him to be. A searing character study this is not, but Bacon’s performance goes a long way toward making us root for the guy no matter how exasperating he gets; even at his most obstinate, the actor is able to exude enough sincerity that you get why people like Maryanne and Cade and Kitty keep giving this guy second chances.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to muster very much feeling about this arc when the people he’s letting down feel paper-thin. The fault lies less with the performers than the writing. Grant is fun as a prim churchgoing grandma who’s tough enough to go toe-to-toe with the gnarliest monster, and it seems a pity that we don’t get to know more of her. Nettles’ gorgeous singing voice is Maryanne’s only defining trait beyond a soft spot for Hub, and it’s deployed sparingly enough that it starts to feel like a missed opportunity to set The Bondsman apart from other shows about Satan or the South.

The villain of The Bondsman is Lucky (Damon Herriman), Hub’s rival for Maryanne’s affections. But he’s less a fully dimensional human being than a cowboy-hatted, Boston-accented plot device. The detail that everyone in town reviles his proud Red Sox fandom is kind of funny the first time. It gets less so upon repetition, as it becomes apparent that “Boston, am I right?” is about as creative as punchlines on this show tend to get.

The most compelling character besides Hub is Midge (Jolene Purdy), his boss at the multilevel marketing company that serves as the earthbound front for the Devil’s activities on Earth. Not coincidentally, she’s also the only one whose backstory and motives have nothing whatsoever to do with Hub.

A Midge-centric episode midway through the eight-part season is a standout — not only because it helps to fill in, ever so slightly, The Bondsman’s vision of Hell, but because it raises the stakes by reminding us that the world is larger than one messed-up if weirdly lovable man.

But those raised stakes prove a double-edged sword. The Bondsman never seems to know quite how seriously to take the state of Hub’s soul, or the looming possibility of apocalypse, or all the many, many deaths along the way. It’s cursed with both a flippancy that keeps its more serious scenes from landing with the weight they require, and an earnest sentimentality that prevents it from embracing simple cheap, dirty fun.

For the most part, the series seems to prefer not to think about what it’s doing with its tone at all, and to keep its focus on the undeniable lizard-brain pleasure of watching Hub jamming a chainsaw into a guy’s face in some twisted effort to earn his salvation. It works, but only as long as the blood is flowing.