Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

Harried bounty hunter Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) finds himself resurrected from the dead, with a new twist on his old job and a hell of a new boss! 

Who doesn’t like Kevin Bacon? No matter what role the actor is in, he brings a uniquely Bacon-like quality to the character, and The Bondsman is no different. Make sure your bullet-resistant vest is in place and let’s get into this! 

So here in Landry, Southern Georgia, Hub is an eternally down-on-his-luck bondsman bounty hunter, bemoaning the singing career he should’ve had with his estranged wife Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles) and their now-teenage son, Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). Maryanne has now taken up with ‘Lucky’ Callahan (Damon Herriman), a former Boston mobster supposedly reformed and now bar owner where Maryanne and Cade perform music together on a regular basis. Hub grudgingly tracks down bounties and with his rough singing-cowboy charm lays the smackdown on these runaway idiots, until the night comes when it all goes entirely cattywampus, and he’s set up and outright killed while working. 

But one monkey don’t stop the circus show, so Hub rises and after some makeshift repairs to his person, decides to go right back to work. Or he would have, after involving his dear beloved bible-thumping and shotgun-wielding mother Kitty (Beth Grant), as the two of them are quite capable of doing the bounty hunter thing together, except someone from his new job has already shown up at the Halloran family digs! 

Midge Kusatsu (Jolene Purdy) isn’t really the kind of person Hub would imagine for his new handler, but Midge proceeds to bluntly explain that Hub now works for the Pot O’ Gold Corporation, the Devils front company here on Earth, and he is now a bounty hunter working for Old Scratch himself, chasing down demons that have somehow managed to escape Hell and sending them back home. And no, Hub gets absolutely no say in the matter of his new job, unless he wants to go back to pushing up daisies. 

So what now? Hub and Kitty will get faxes of the latest target on the company fax machine that was left behind in their house, though research on demonic weaknesses and such are up to them and their search-engine-fu, and as the Hallorans work feverishly to keep bystanders from becoming blood-smears while taking down increasingly-stronger demons, Hub begins to notice connecting patterns in their rampages. Initially both Hub and Kitty agreed to keep Maryanne and Cade as far away from this very different form of bounty hunting as much as humanly possible, but there comes a point where Cade, who indeed has more sense than God gave a goose, figures out at least half of it and gets reluctantly filled in on the rest by his scarred dad. And that means that inevitably Maryanne will be told, or figure out there’s more than just weirdness going on, and have to be informed too. And while all the Hallorans being in the know about their patriarch being a bounty hunter for the Devil may be helpful in pooling their brains if nothing else, it also puts all of them in increasing danger. And at some point or another, each and every Halloran will turn and ask Hub, why, why was he sent to Hell when he was murdered? How did he end up being offered a deal by the Devil himself? What did dear old dad, the harried and harassed and would-be drunken hero, do that was that bad? 

Everything is coming down to a very final confrontation between the innocent Hallorans behind the devilish Hub, a very badly misinformed Lucky who’s now convinced himself of his own mutated divinity on a mission, and an incredibly powerful escaped demon who could shake the very foundations of our Earthly plane itself if she’s not stopped. By this time you’d think Hub would have learned he can’t actually use his gritty charm to smarm his way out of this situation, and also that going it alone has caused nothing but trouble up to this point, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And now Hub, and poor Maryanne, the rest of the Hallorans and indeed, a very frustrated Midge and the whole of humanity have a much larger problem on their hands! 

Make sure your shotguns’ loaded and catch all the demonic action in The Bondsman, on Amazon Prime now!