'Barry' review: Final season is fast, furious, funny

WHAT IT'S ABOUT After his former acting coach Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and interrogation specialist Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom) trapped hit man and ex-Marine Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) in the third season finale, Barry finds himself in prison, where he is surprised to find an old frenemy. Fates await many over this final season, including girlfriend Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), handler Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root), and Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) and his love interest, Cristobal (Michael Irby) — both of whom have decided to go legit. 

MY SAY Everything must come to an end, but the end sure seems to have come fast for "Barry." This comedy, or drama, or (hey!) whatever you wanna call it, had a solid first season, better second, and mind-blowing third. As "Barry" improved, the fandom swelled, critics swooned, Emmys followed, and — when he apparently couldn't abide one more piece of praise — Hader pulled the plug.

It's hard to know when to go out on top, harder to know what the "top" is. But a case could be made that "Barry" was a movie all along, with the progression of one that had a beginning, middle and end, which will arrive May 28. 

After the pandemic stopped production of the third season, Hader and series co-creator Alec Berg spent their downtime writing this fourth, where they discovered a natural endpoint. They went back to rewrite the third (shooting hadn't yet started) to make all the pieces fit.

What fans will see over the next seven episodes (those made available for review) won't suggest a mad dash to the finish line, but something entirely new — a whole new series in some respects. To say what that is would spoil it for you, other than what the promos have already revealed (the prison setting). But tone and theme are fair game.

 Foremost, "Barry" is funny again, or funny in that bleak, bitter, horrifying way that a Tarantino movie is "funny," or (for that matter) "Barry" of the second season. The third was overwhelmingly dark; the clouds have parted in the fourth.

The show is also back to remind us why this ride mattered in the first place. "Barry" was mostly about life's bitter illusions as refracted through America today — the orgy of guns, violence, war and insanity that plays out on the front pages or in the movies. It was also about how all that is cauterized on a blank slate, or piece of wood, waiting to be carved. Under similar circumstances, who's to say the rest of us couldn't be Barrys too?

Hollywood, or the Hollywood factory line, became the standing metaphor for this, because where else do we get our illusions delivered by the truckload? "Barry" wasn't some rebuke of gun culture or Hollywood's groveling embrace of it — far from it: "Barry" and Barry were simply products of both, or reflections in a dark mirror.

In fact, look closely and you too will see far more love than contempt, especially in this fourth. "Barry" was Hader's own mash note to Hollywood, the series' name even a tribute to two formative Barrys — Sonnenfeld ("Get Shorty") and Levinson, whose "Rain Man" gets a crucial shoutout in a later episode.

Hader and Berg wanted us to know that our illusions are vital and essential. They can also be destructive and twisted — or foment evil. But they do matter, and so does that dream factory on the fault line. 

Nonetheless, "Barry" was a cautionary story. Best to approach it that way over this final lap. 

 BOTTOM LINE Fast, furious, funny, with a twist.