Seventies B-movie flourishes threaten to overwhelm the action in 'Hunters,' Amazon's Nazi revenge-fantasy series. Alan Sepinwall's review
takes place in a 1977 vision of New York ripped more from the movies of the era than from reality. The afros are big , the clothes loud , and the disco and soul music pumping. In one scene, Jonah Heidelbaum , a young Jewish man whose grandmother Ruth was in the camps with Meyer, gets high in Coney Island with his friends and performs an elaborate production number to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.
“The Talmud is wrong: Living well is not the best revenge,” Meyer tells Jonah. “You know what the best revenge is?There is a lot going on in this show, which also includes Dylan Baker as a member of Jimmy Carter’s cabinet who isn’t what he seems and Jerrika Hinton as an FBI agent whose investigation runs parallel to Meyer and Jonah’s. It’s so much that Weil opts to openwith a 90-minute premiere episode that frequently buckles under its own weight.
But even the style can become numbing, particularly as the sequences pile up of Nazis being punished in karmically appropriate ways. The fifth episode goes so heavy on torture-as-poetic-justice that a long break may be required after. And all the flourishes and homages also undercut Weil’s attempts to more sincerely examine the atrocities of the Holocaust and the lifelong pain and guilt felt by its survivors.
Pacino’s mere presence foregrounds the Seventies affection of it all, though his performance is a mixed bag. His Eastern European accent is broad verging on caricature , but this is for the most part a more understated Pacino than we often get these days. Logan Lerman is the show’s actual lead, and holds his own against his older co-stars. Still, the degree to which any of this cartoonish mayhem feels real is largely a credit to the gravity Pacino provides in certain moments.
That Amazon only made the first five episodes available for review could just be spoiler paranoia. Or it could be that a show that’s already barely in command of its own tone and characters spirals completely out of control in its second half. Whether the series is directly aping Seventies B-movies or viewing them through the filter of Tarantino, many of its influences tend not to end well. Proceed with caution, and maybe bring some headphones in case things get dangerously loud.
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