Hunters

When Auschwitz survivor Ruth Heidelbaum (Jeannie Berlin) is murdered in 1977 New York City, her grandson Jonah (Logan Lerman) tries to find out who killed her. In doing so, he joins Ruth’s friend Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), a philanthropist who leads a group of clandestine Nazi hunters. The Hunters’ activities catch the attention of the Nazi remnant Fourth Reich, whose leader The Colonel (Lena Olin) dispatches American operative Travis (Greg Austin) to deal with them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton) encounters bureaucratic resistance as she attempts to investigate deaths connected to both groups.

There is an unspoken edict that any fictionalization of the Holocaust should still retain an air of somber gravitas, and, true to form, many Holocaust-themed works do. However, there is also a less visible tradition of Holocaust alt-history, which has resulted in works both absurd (The Boys from Brazil and its South American-bred child Hitler clones) and audacious if also morally clouded (Inglourious Basterds). Hunters, an Amazon Prime series devised by the grandson of Holocaust survivors (David Weil) belongs to the latter tradition. Upon release, Shoah Foundation director Stephen Smith denounced it as “deceptive, voyeuristic, trivializing pulp nonsense.” While it is tempting to dismiss this as hypersensitive kvetching, Hunters really is chock full of bad history, embarrassing moments and uneven pacing, tempered somewhat by strong performances, and, during its best episodes, plenty of tension and excitement.

First, the good: freed from the need to ham it up and shout in every scene, Pacino delivers one of his better late-career performances, imbuing Meyer with equal parts sagaciousness, righteousness, and ruthlessness. The overacting void is filled here by Dylan Baker as Biff, a Carter administration official with a hidden Nazi past who goes from sounding like Lindsey Graham one moment to Preacher’s Herr Starr the next. His escapades are only tangentially related to the main plot, but it’s at least an amusing distraction, and he’s a more layered character than Olin’s frosty one-note Colonel. As an audience surrogate weighing the desire for revenge against the brutal necessity of carrying it out, Lerman is merely OK. Hinton’s tenacious agent is a better stand-in for an outsider’s perspective while Austin is terrifyingly good as a murderous all-American psychopath given to random singing. Among the other Hunters, Saul Rubinek and Carl Kane are solid as husband-wife camp survivors seeking to avenge their murdered son, and Kate Mulvaney is captivating as Sister Harriet, an acerbic, take-no-prisoners, raised-Catholic German-Jewish refugee turned nun turned MI6 agent (!). The team also consists of a pompous actor (Josh Radnor), a black power activist (Tiffany Boone), and a Vietnam War vet (Louis Ozawa), the latter two of whom are given little development and are condescendingly reduced to symbols of token diversity despite the performers making the most of their minimal screen time.

In between pondering moral dilemmas and delivering exhilarating fight scenes and shootouts, Hunters often stumbles badly. As mentioned, it’s a poor representation of history, treating as shocking the American recruitment of former Nazi scientists even though this was revealed in 1946 and replacing depictions of actual wartime atrocities with over-the-top human chess games. It also takes a few tonal detours into parody game show segments (Why Do We Hate the Jews?) and mock-travel advertisements that frame Huntsville, Alabama as an ideal Nazi retirement community. These cringeworthy asides undercut the show’s weightier moments and make them hard to take seriously.

Hunters’ premise shows enough promise to justify its existence, but if the first season is anything to go by, it also shows enough missteps to see it fall short of its potential.