Hunters is Amazon’s latest high profile action adventure series from executive producer Jordan Peele, staring Logan Lerman (Fury) and Al Pacino (The Irishman) as unlikely members of a gang of vigilante Nazi hunters in 1977 Brooklyn. The series was created by actor-turned-writer David Weil in his first ever credited writing job. The series attempts to be both an earnest contemplation of the cost of violence and inherited trauma and an at times gleeful exercise in genre thrills. In this way, it is hard to deny the influence of a film like Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. However, in the first few episodes Hunters falls quite a bit short of those lofty expectations.
Our story begins following the life of Lerman’s Jonah, a comic book shop clerk in his early 20’s living in 1977 Brooklyn with his Holocaust-surviving grandmother Ruth, (Jeannie Berlin, Succession). Lerman portrays Jonah as a young man with a bit of a chip on his shoulder and an unexpected edge to him to match the sensitive interior and innocence he innately brings to all of his roles. He also has a fearful aversion to physical violence that is directly at odds with his drive to advocate for himself and those he loves in a world we are immediately meant to perceive as violent and oppressive to a young man like him.
This internal conflict between the warring sides of himself is quickly pushed into overdrive when the violence of the past returns upon him and disrupts the life of those he cares for most. In the early episodes of the series, this conflict is the most grounded and emotionally engaging aspect of the series. Lerman’s capacity to make the audience root for him and access his emotions is consistently the best part of the series. There is a true sense of loss, of trauma, and of a deeply frustrated desire to rage against the injustice of a world that could allow such horrors to ever be committed which all match the intensity of the series broader desire to use the Holocaust as the emotional backdrop of its story.
Hunters gets into trouble when it attempts to marry these real world horrors and palpable emotional angst with the genre trapping of an exploitation-era inspired comic book team up caper. The series is riddled with somewhat self-conscious comic book references, thanks in part to Jonah’s chosen profession as a comic book store clerk, and that inspiration is clearly on display starting especially in its second episode when Jonah is brought into an underground group of Nazi hunters led by a very wealthy old friend of his grandmother named Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino).
Meyer’s impressive Upper East Side mansion, secret lair, and ragtag group of hunters all feel so ripped from the pages of a comic book that I had to triple-check to confirm this was not based on any pre-existing source materials. His team consists of a former actor (Josh Radnor, How I Met Your Mother), a member of the Black Panther Party whose look evokes a Foxy Brown type (Tiffany Boone, The Chi), a former MI-6 agent who also appears to be a nun (Kate Mulvany, The Great Gatsby), an Asian American Vietnam Vet (Louis Ozawa, Kidding), and a pair of survivors who are both married and tech/weapons experts (Carol Kane, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Saul Raubinek, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).
As I’m sure you can tell by their descriptions, the scenes featuring these team members, especially at first, end up feeling very removed from the emotional reality at the heart of what made the first hour so effective. One could make the case that tonal variety on a show with such a heavy subject matter could serve as a necessary break from the heavier moments, but parody commercials and musical numbers and characters straight out of ’70s exploitation films feel a bit too dissonant with the more grounded content.
The presence of Travis, an American born white supremacist working for the underground group of Nazi’s our heroes are trying to murder one by one in the name of justice, only compounds this problem. Greg Austin (Mr. Selfridge) plays Travis as a sociopath with a wholesomely unnerving sense of evil and violence. His angel of death by way of seething bigotry is a concept we’ve seen many times over the years. It often feels like we should be equal parts titillated and appalled by the menace he poses. However, his character archetype is such a tired trope at this point that it is difficult not to be both bored by the lack of shock and confused why a series so interested in the human cost of violence would feature a character that uses violence to shock and excite its audience in such a showy way.
Not every ’70s inspired corner of the series feels out of place here, however. Parallel to the story of Jonah and his Nazi hunting associates, Hunters introduces us to Jerrika Hinton (Grey’s Anatomy) as FBI Agent Millie Morris as she falls head first into a conspiracy thriller as she tries to untangle the threads of an underground society of Nazis living inside the US and the underground team of vigilante’s trying to murder them. As a black queer woman working in the FBI, Agent Morris is used to being disrespected and overlooked inside the Bureau, which pushes her into trying to untangle this web all on her own. Hinton is extremely charismatic and relatable in her role and serves as an even better audience surrogate for the crazy world we are being plunged into as viewers than Lerman’s Jonah.
With a cast as talented and multifaceted as this, Hunters is a series that cannot simply be dismissed for its faults. Hinton, Lerman, and Pacino ground this series in likable characters that help smooth over a lot of the wild tonal shifts the series engages in early on. The work they are doing and the impressive alt-history world creator David Weil has developed are enough to justify giving this one some time to even out and grow into the messy, emotional, thrilling series this could become.
