Peak TV is a glorious thing, but it’s far from perfect.
Example A: “Hunters,” the new Amazon Prime series starring the legendary Al Pacino. The ‘70s set thriller reveals a network of Nazis infiltrating our corridors of power. Enter a gang of Nazi hunters, ready to crush this network with methods that would make Jack Bauer blush.
It’s a tonal Hindenburg – Tarantino-esque one minute, “Schindler’s List” the next. For those aghast at the comic detours taken by “Jojo Rabbit,” this is infinitely worse, sloppier and crude.
That’s not the only problem for the show, debuting Feb. 21. “Hunters” is alternately glib and dull, a pastiche of emotions, tones and styles that alternately bore and disgust.
The show opens badly as an undercover Nazi is exposed with bloody repercussions. Dylan Baker, certified gold as a soulless creep (see “Happiness”), is part of a larger network of surviving Nazis promising the Fourth Reich.
It’s a silly setup based oh, so loosely on the truth. Nazis did hide in plain sight in America during the 1970s. The reasons behind their survival are far more interesting, and complicated, than anything shown here.
We soon meet Jonah (Logan Lerman), a surly Jewish teen who sounds like he’s minoring in Moral Relativism. Jonah even has a soft spot for Darth Vader. He’s immediately unlikable, sullen and Millennial-like despite the time period.
Even Pacino’s character takes notice.
“You’re what they call a little sh**,” Pacino’s Meyer Hoffman growls. Meyer is a “Jewish” Bruce Wayne of sorts, a millionaire funneling his cash to hunt down the remaining Nazis.
On and on it goes for the first two episodes, veering from ghastly Holocaust flashbacks to fourth wall-breaking winks.
Pick a lane, please.
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Even when the show embraces its pulp roots it’s a snore. Or, more precisely, a sadistic snore. Both the heroes and villain revel in torture, although only one side does it for the “right” reasons. Jonah is the only character who winces at the techniques. He’s outnumbered, though.
“It’s not murder, it’s a mitzvah,” Meyer explains.
“Hunters” dabbles in Nostalgia Porn when it isn’t indulging in Torture Porn. It’s not enough to hear countless ‘70s songs and see a plethora of sideburned heroes. We’re also force-fed closeups of the same TV Guide magazine with a radiant Farrah Fawcett smiling on its cover.
Every third character has that same edition! Isn’t time passing in the story? This was a weekly magazine, remember?
And did TV Guide truly have that level of market penetration? You ask these questions because the story unfolding is a dud.
Al Pacino vs Nazis: the true story that inspired his new Amazon series #Hunters https://t.co/2BA4XWuBN4
— Telegraph TV & Radio (@TeleTVRadio) February 15, 2020
The first two episodes lack the clunky anti-Trump rhetoric this critic expected. The closest to progressive messaging is a character noting, “The truth matters now more than ever,” a platitude the Left loves to share sans irony.
It’s possible the show will get political before season one wraps. The storytelling so far is dutifully on the nose, making those kinds of transitions feasible.
A few tantalizing bits emerge from the “Hunters'” wreckage. A chess-inspired Holocaust scene is like body horror on steroids. A monologue Pacino delivers near the end of episode one strikes an emotional chord without bloodshed or bravado.
The series’ score, haunting, majestic and with a kiss of chamber music, feels wildly appropriate. And Pacino, God bless him, doesn’t nibble on any scenery, at least during the first two episodes screened by this critic.
The stilted dialogue and contrived situations still reek of 21st century awareness.
“She’s as excited as a white girl at an Engelbert Humperdinck concert,” one character quips. Later, we see a child with a peanut allergy, a trend that exploded more than a decade after the show is set.
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There’s something symbolic about a prestige streamer, teamed with an “it” producer (Jordan Peele), releasing “Hunters” at this time. The rise of Trump, we’re told, sparked a white supremacist renaissance.
It’s one reason the “Charlottesville Lie” endures – to prop up that feeble narrative.
That may have set the creative fuse behind “Hunters.” It still doesn’t explain away the torturous nature of the first two episodes.
It’s just woke trash, full of diversity and gehyness that was not prevalent in the 70s.
you think a ‘BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM’ series will ever be made anywhere? Or Holodomir survivors avenging the the deaths of THEIR loved ones (boy could THAT be spun in about a million ways!)
One of the reasons Hollywood is so obsessed with making so many Nazi movies/TV shows is because all of the other mass-murdering regimes were solidly on the Left, so portraying them as villains would be politically inconvenient. So instead of getting a Nazi movie, a Stalinist movie and a Chairman Mao movie, we get three Nazi movies in a row.
Jewish fangirl checking in. And once again, Hollywood is obsessed not with the facts of the brutality of Nazi Germany but using history as an allegory to push current day political agendas. In my opinion the more they rely on this yardstick, the more more it cheapens and dulls the true horrors of the Holocaust. I’m weary and disgusted of this.
I’ve yet to see Hollywood come full out against the evils of Communist Russia and Islamic terrorism. Whatever Spielberg accomplished with “Schindler’s List”, he undid with “Munich” by vilifying the Mossad agents who went after the terrorists that murdered theirs athletes.
Hollywood has sorted Jews into several negative categories:
1. Victims of the Holocaust
2. Perpetrators of Middle East conflict (i.e. “Israeli occupation”)
3. “Ultra-Orthodox” = religious fanatics
4. Nebby pathetic assimilated Jews
If a film-maker *really* wants to get creative and do a story outside-the-box, I dare them to take up the challenge of creating a tale where Jewish people can become heroes.
Sounds like a Miss, then.
I watched the trailer and the other thing that got me, aside from looking like a train wreck was that none of Nazis were of the Democrat variety; that is black or Muslim. i guess that’s why they set this in the 70s so as to avoid that inconvenient little truth.
That said, the US government was for sure guilty of harboring perhaps dozens or even hundreds of actual war criminals after WW2 minimally under the guise of helping us fight the Cold War, and that was not one of our more shining moments. And it’s a story worth telling by a serious film maker in an objective manner… if one actually still exists in Hollywood.
But just seeing the trailer, this show I can almost guarantee is straight-up anti-Trump anti-Conservative agitprop.