THE BAKER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Baker, Falling Forward Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 27, 2023

Ron Perlman is such a distinctive actor, with his hulking frame and grizzled whisper of a voice belying his capacity to portray rich internal strife and compassion. That he hasn't quite reached a level of movie stardom probably has to do with the inherently contradictory nature of his screen presence (It's telling that his most famous role is playing a misunderstood demon, because few actors could that off in terms of physicality and be so compelling under so much makeup and prosthetic work).

Now in his 70s, Perlman gets a leading role in The Baker, as a slightly withered and quite weary action hero, still capable of doing a lot of damage to foes. If the basics of Paolo Mancini and Thomas Michael's screenplay weren't so generic, there might have been something to the character and the movie as a whole.

Instead, it's an unlikely star vehicle for an unlikely star, which makes at least some part of the core of director Jonathan Sobol's movie worthwhile. Perlman is quite good here, making us wonder what he might have accomplished in decades prior if more filmmakers had possessed the insight to see the actor's full potential—instead relegating him to supporting roles and side characters. Sometimes, being too distinctive can be a curse in the movie industry, but Sobol at least saw what Perlman could bring to a front-and-center role, even at this point in the actor's career.

He plays, of course, a baker, whom we'll refer to as "the Baker," since this is the sort of character who long ago put his real name and other false identities behind him. Yes, the Baker has a shadowy past, barely established by blurry flashbacks to his younger self killing people, nightmares of the sounds of combat, and a police detective wondering why the only traces of any official record of the guy have been redacted.

Does it matter what he did and for whom he worked in any kind of specificity? No, we just need to know that the Baker is capable of enacting a lot of violence and just needs an excuse to do it again.

The excuse is a significant and familiar one. His son Peter (Joel David Moore), a struggling entrepreneur, witnesses a bloody ambush in an airport parking lot, and after all of the participants have killed each other, he finds the duffel bag over which they had been fighting for possession. It's filled with packets of a strong and rare kind of heroin, and if Peter can find someone to whom to sell the haul, he and his 8-year-old daughter Delphi (Emma Ho) can start a new and easy life together.

Along the way to meet his contact, Peter stops at his father's bakery. The two haven't spoken in a long time, meaning the Baker meets his granddaughter for the first time, too. With all of that established, it's only a matter of getting Peter out of the way, leaving the Baker and Delphi to go on the run, try to find out what happened to Peter, and avoid the goons pursuing them, with our hero fighting back whenever said henchmen get too close.

There is, obviously, nothing new about the basic idea—in which a seemingly improbable character turns out to secretly be an agent of considerable violence—and specific plotting—in which our man must carry out an impromptu investigation while defending himself against enemies—of this movie. Apart from Perlman himself being the lead role, the somewhat unique thing, perhaps, is the degree of weariness and regret afforded to the Baker, who doesn't go looking for a fight and finds himself trying to be a better grandfather than the emotionally absent father he was. The great benefit of casting Perlman is how much solemn, understated weight he brings to those scenes.

Mancini and Michael have a second solid idea here in the person of the organized crime lieutenant looking for the drugs (The boss is played by Harvey Keitel in a couple of scenes). That man is played by Elias Koteas as a kind of reflection of the Baker, in that he's haunted by his own past and present deeds of senseless murder. Koteas is another unique actor, obviously, and watching these two attempt to bring depth to what would otherwise be archetypical characters is fascinating, even if the filmmakers only seem to consider them transitional quirks in between the scenes we expect.

A decent amount of those are action sequences, with the Baker pummeling and brutally killing an assortment of goons with his bare hands, his feet, and an assortment of items that might be lying around him (Yes, a rolling pin is implemented for a coup de grâce in one moment). They're somewhat awkwardly staged, especially a chest-level one-take in the back of the Baker's most conspicuous delivery truck, in order to cheat Perlman's participation in them.

More importantly, though, the reliance on action only highlights how limited the scope and how routine the entire exercise of The Baker actually is. With Perlman and Koteas, the movie hints at characters and a story worth more than something so typical, and the usual stuff on display isn't particularly effective, either.

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