Caper comedies are tough to pull off as a series, mainly because series depend on character development and a more nuanced take on the comedy it’s trying to present. Capers are more about broad strokes and wackiness. A new Mexican comedy on HBO Max is essentially a caper comedy, but one that tries to make connections among all its many characters.
BUNKER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man who is somewhat drunk starts making a video talking about which of his kids get to use his bunker when he’s dead.
The Gist: Vladimiro Ortiz (Bruno Bichir, brother of Academy Award nominated actor Demián Bichir) hides down in the well-appointed bunker under his house most of the time. It’s been down there for a long time; the equipment looks like it’s Cold War-era, and half of the descriptions are in Russian. He doesn’t care what they do with his ashes when he dies, he just doesn’t want to be interred in the family crypt. When he goes upstairs to get a charger for the camcorder he’s using, he’s berated by his wife Amparo (Claudette Maillé), which is why he heads back underground pretty quickly.
A local aquatic park is being inundated by protestors after a dolphin mauls a child’s arm. The owner, Napoleón Ortega (Miguel Rodarte), can’t fathom playing 500,000 pesos to the family, and he seems to be nonplussed by the protestors, despite the water balloons full of blood pelting his windows. He especially admires the peeing skills of the lead protestor Bruna (Gisselle Kuri), who’s peeing on a poster of his face. He’s got bigger fish to fry, so to speak: A deal with a very violent man named Oleg (Victor Oliveira) for something called “The Mother.” He also has time to insult his dolphin-suited son Osiris (Jesús Zavala) as he drives to get a colonic.
In another spot, Casper (Ricardo Polanco) lights scented candles in an otherwise disgusting safe house that the gang he just joined holes up. Maya (Liz Gallardo), the ringleader, yells at Casper for wasting time and money on those candles, and they all go out to grab “the package”. That “package” is Napoleón, floating in a pool with a cannula up his bum. He passes out, cannula caught in his sphincter, with his “doctor” telling the kidnappers that the intestines are the key to everything and to be careful. They try to go back to their safe house, but it’s ablaze, due to Casper leaving one of the candles lit. But he has somewhere else they can hide Napoleón: A bunker under his father’s house.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The caper vibes of Bunker make us think of a show from way back, The Knights Of Prosperity, which was built around a group of misfits who decide to kidnap Mick Jagger.
Our Take: Bunker is supposed to be anarchic and wacky, with a massive cast of characters that all have their own things going on, whose fates and stories are interconnected. But the first episode is such a muddled mess that we just got tired keeping track of everybody.
And it seems that everyone is important, because each and every character with a speaking part gets their own introduction, with a freeze frame, name, age, occupation, and a little jokey line about them. It’s dizzying, and it takes away from actually establishing any of the characters as anything but archetypes.
There is a story in there, about both Vladimiro, who is apparently a scion of a plunger empire, and Napoleón, who, as his intro says, “hates animals.” We wonder if showrunner Esteban Seimandi and his writing staff will ever get to the story as they unravel all of the connections between Vladimiro’s family — which includes Casper and Bruna — and the plot that brought an unconscious, tight-sphinctered Napoleón into his bunker. But the first episode was such a slog that we’re not going to stick around and find out.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: As the gang carry Napoleón into the bunker, Maya knocks Vladimiro out cold, then looks around and says, “What the hell is this?”
Sleeper Star: Liz Gallardo is the bright spot as Maya, especially when she’s about to lose her shit seeing the candle-created inferno Casper created.
Most Pilot-y Line: The only thing the description graphic could say about one of the characters, Elenora Smith (Paulette Hernandez), is that she is a “squishy ball fan,” because she’s holding a squishy ball. It’s supposed to be funny, but it’s basically lame.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Bunker tries way too hard to be clever, and it sacrifices pretty much any subtlety and character development in the process.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
