Bacon, Kevin

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    In ‘The Bondsman,’ Kevin Bacon Goes to Hell and Back

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    The actor stars as the title character in this new horror comedy series, playing a man charged with tracking down escaped demons.The devil goes down to Georgia in the horror comedy series “The Bondsman,” but he’s not looking for a fiddle fight. This demon master is actually an old-school telemarketer, fax machine at the ready, overseeing a pyramid scheme of lost souls. And when he taps you on the shoulder, you’d best be ready to do his handiwork.A gory, tongue-in-cheek slice of Southern Gothic, the new Amazon Prime Video series, premiering Thursday, presents a system of penance that borders on bureaucracy. A rural Georgia bondsman named Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) stumbles into the scheme in the first episode, when his throat gets slit in the line of duty. Coming to with a gaping wound in his neck, he soon realizes that he has been to hell and it has spit him back up. He’s still a bondsman, but now his job is to track down demons that have escaped from hell. If he refuses, he gets sent back.In a TV landscape offering no shortage of horror in recent years, “The Bondsman” has a folksier flavor than most. The show’s haunts are rural; the main characters are scared and surprised by the demons they encounter, but they also just seem inconvenienced and perturbed by the whole affair.“The operational theory is like, ‘Well, hell, I was going to go grocery shopping today, and instead, I’ve got to deal with a demon on the loose in my small town,’” said Erik Oleson, the showrunner. “It’s just one more of those things that the system keeps sticking on you.”The system, in this case, is represented by Pot O’ Gold, which presents itself as a tenacious series of pop-up ads and voice mail messages offering one of those opportunities that you just shouldn’t pass up. The company logo is a jovial leprechaun. The boss is the devil himself, though he’s too busy to make himself seen; instead he sends a very cheerful, un-devilish minion (Jolene Purdy) to give Hub his new assignment.Hub is skeptical, though he notices that his slashed throat, which he initially covered up with duct tape, seems to have magically healed. Soon he’s off to hunt down demons, armed with a variety of weapons (shotgun, chain saw), and Kitty, his spitfire mama (Beth Grant) by his side.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ Review: It’s Busted

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      Eddie Murphy struggles to revive the moribund action-comedy franchise.In “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” the Detroit detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is no longer the fast, young cop we last saw 30 years ago. The beleaguered Captain Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser) thinks the older and slower Axel should reconnect with his estranged daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), who works as a defense attorney in Los Angeles. She is representing someone accused of killing a possible dirty cop. When masked men dangle Jane’s car with her inside from a roof, Axel, at the request of his longtime pal Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), comes to Los Angeles to find the culprits.Murphy returns with the same Detroit Lions jacket, his familiar chuckle and his movie star grin. But there’s little to smile about in this painfully lackluster retread desperately trying to justify its own existence.In his feature directing debut, Mark Molloy — who plied his trade making commercials — tries to imagine a world where Axel is no longer a beloved wisecracker. Jane hates Axel for abandoning her as a child. Her former flame, Detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who later teams up with Axel, also thinks Axel’s penchant for public destruction is outdated. Axel’s ruminations on parenting and policing are short-lived in the face of the flashy Captain Cade Grant (Kevin Bacon), who seems to be actively impeding Axel’s investigation as a bemused Chief John Taggart (John Ashton) looks on.Molloy’s film (streaming on Netflix) is a slog: The dirty cop mystery is half-baked; the visual effects are half-rendered; the action lacks any sense of physical space. In the opening scene, Axel’s attempt to stop a robbery in the Red Wings’ locker room becomes a shaky street chase with Axel in a snowplow and the robbers on bikes. Rather than film the scene as a cohesive shot, Molloy filmed the bikers and Murphy separately. The result is a scattered set piece without any visual cohesion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘They/Them’ Review: Scared Straight

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      A masked ax-murderer runs amok at a gay conversion camp in this flimsy, Kevin Bacon-starring slasher flick.When Kevin Bacon first appears in John Logan’s “They/Them” as Owen Whistler, a counselor at a summer gay conversion camp, he exudes an affable, ingratiating charisma that puts the apprehensive campers cautiously at ease. Rather than coming off as a bigoted tyrant, Owen seems kind and open-minded, employing social justice terminology to promise that he doesn’t intend to force anybody to be straight, but simply wants to help them “find their truth” — a considerate attitude that even partially appeases Jordan (Theo Germaine), a nonbinary teen immediately suspicious of Whistler’s approach. Because this is a slasher movie, Whistler’s overly polite demeanor carries for the audience an edge of latent menace. This is a horror flick about L.G.B.T.Q. teens at a conversion camp, after all. There’s no way it’s going to be that easy.Whistler’s genial facade does eventually slip, and “They/Them” ramps up the familiar slasher violence, as a masked, ax-wielding maniac begins butchering various people around camp. But Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame. Slasher movies demand a certain willingness to be provocative, or even tasteless: a little incendiary zeal is essential to the effect. “They/Them” wants badly to avoid offending anyone, and takes pains to avoid any action that might be considered problematic. Well, the result is probably inoffensive — a horror movie without blood pumping in its veins.They/ThemNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More