‘HUNTERS’ SETS SIGHTS ON NAZIS
“Hunters,” a new series coming to Amazon Prime Video today, offers various ways in. A lot of people will be excited because Jordan Peele helped bring it about. (He’s an executive producer.) That would have been me in 2015, post “Key & Peele”; not so much now, post “Twilight Zone” and “Us.”
Then there’s the show’s logline: A motley crew of talented but everyday folks in 1977
Son of Sam New York, assembled and led by a mysterious concentration camp survivor, hunt Nazis and uncover a deep-state conspiracy to bring back the Reich. Catchy, but it could go either way.
But really, the show has us at Al Pacino. He plays the group’s leader, Meyer Offerman, and it’s his first regular starring role in a TV series, after portraying problematic men (Roy Cohn, Phil Spector, Joe Paterno)
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in a smattering of HBO movies and miniseries. At 79, he’s having his peak-tv coming-out party.
Having gotten Pacino, though, “Hunters” doesn’t do much with him, or with its premise or the rest of its stellar cast. He’s fine — he adroitly underplays Meyer’s compassionate vengefulness amid the noisier, more hyperbolic elements of a comic-book-style action fantasy. But there’s something generic about Meyer, and about “Hunters,” even as the show tries very hard to be singular. Defending Pacino against the inevitable inauthentic-casting charges (an Italian American playing a Jewish avenger), his co-star Logan Lerman said in an interview, “Come on, anybody can play the role.” Exactly.
“Hunters” is the creation of David Weil, a young actor, and it’s his only completed writing and producing credit on IMDB. His influences show. The obvious one — in the show’s jokey tone, its not-quite-cartoonish violence, its winking evocation of the 1970s and its thematic affinity with “Inglourious Basterds” — is Quentin Tarantino.
But in the five (of 10) episodes available for review, there are others that are just as apt: the “Oceans” films (Weil apparently missed the “Rick and Morty” episode on the lameness of caper-crew stories), and Steven Spielberg in both his “Schindler’s List” and “Munich” modes. (“Hunters” includes frequent flashbacks to the camps, shot with a relatively straightforward but still artificial Hollywood-soundstage feeling.)
Most noticeable — in the show’s declamatory approach, in its toggling between naturalism and a highly metabolized stylization, even in the look and deployment of its on-screen graphics — is a kinship with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Sam Catlin’s “Preacher,” another show that used religion as the underpinning of an exercise in genre indulgence and excess. Like “Preacher,” but less successfully, “Hunters” employs the currently popular strategy of pointedly jumping among times and places, wielding history and geography to give a greater sense of weight or import to what are essentially Saturday matinee adventures.
In “Hunters,” the primary focus of that attempted fusion is Jonah Heidelbaum, the 19-year-old Brooklynite, petty drug dealer and comics-shop employee played by Lerman. (He was Percy in the “Percy Jackson” movies, but discerning viewers will remember him as the young future president in “Jack and Bobby” on the WB.)
Jonah is part Peter Parker, an incipient hero — he doesn’t have superpowers, but he’s a whiz at cracking codes — who’s been raised by a female relative, his Auschwitzsurvivor grandmother (Jeannie Berlin in the show’s present, Annie Hägg in the World War II scenes). Her death, and his desire for revenge, bring him to the attention of Meyer and Meyer’s seemingly ordinary crew, which includes a bickering couple (Carol Kane and Saul Rubinek), a skeevy actor (Josh Radnor), a Vietnam vet (Louis Ozawa), a Pam Grier-style tough chick (Tiffany Boone) and a violent nun (Kate Mulvany).
But Jonah is also the embodiment, at least in the early episodes, of a moral debate about ends versus means and the righteousness of vigilante murder, even when the victims are former Nazis who have brought their schemes for world domination to the United States.
It’s the kind of high-low narrative bridge that comic books pull off all the time, and there’s nothing particularly inappropriate or tasteless about the way “Hunters” handles it. But there’s nothing particularly interesting or exciting about it, either.
Jonah’s situation feels synthesized, a computer mash-up of “Spider-man” and “Marathon Man.” Weil’s parallels of historical atrocities — murder by shower head, medical experimentation, looted Jewish treasures — with the present-day actions of his Nazis and their hunters don’t register as either clever or offensive. They’re just plot points.
An awful lot of talent has been assembled for “Hunters” — Pacino, Kane, Rubinek, Berlin, Lena Olin and Dylan Baker as high-ranking Nazis, Jerrika Hinton as an FBI agent tracking both the Nazis and the hunters. They all acquit themselves well, and the show exhibits a high degree of competence and polish in its production.
But it feels underwritten, and the actors underused (with the exception of Greg Austin as a coldblooded American Nazi hit man). It never quite gets the blend of dramatic intensity, comicbook embroidery and cathartic action that it seems to be going for. “Hunters,” like the hunters team itself, is less than the sum of its parts.
Considine writes for The New York Times.