Hunters
Hunters – which sees a diverse band of Holocaust survivors hunting Nazis in 70s America – tries to have and do it all
Hunters is not terrible; it’s just that it’s not great either. And when you’re talking about a premise as intriguing as a diverse group of heroes hunting Nazis in 1970s America, a resounding ‘meh’ is not ideal.
Yes, Al Pacino is captivating as Meyer Offerman, a Holocaust survivor hell-bent on destroying an insidious Nazi plot against America with the help of his band of merry men and women, but therein lies the show’s problem. It takes a balancing act like no other for any fictional narrative to soberly depict the horrors of the Holocaust and the gleeful revenge of its survivors, without the latter’s celebratory tone inherently undermining the former’s unimaginable tragedy. Hunters desperately struggles to find it.
It doesn’t help that the show tries to have and do it all: frequent flashbacks to concentration camps, the escapades of Offerman’s hunters including training Logan Lerman’s newbie Jonah, the Nazis’ mysterious endgame, and an FBI agent discovering all of the above for herself while trying to keep alive her relationship with her mother’s nurse.
The result is somehow not a mess – in fact there are certain standouts such as Dylan Baker’s undercover Nazi Biff Simpson and Josh Radnor’s Lonnie Flash – but it does mean that it’s so hard to identify what exactly Hunters is trying to be that you quickly give up and just let it wash over you. That's not an ideal reaction to a show about Holocaust survivors killing Nazis.
Streaming on Amazon Prime