Hunters (2020)

The series has a lush and vibrant production design, an overwhelmingly array of stylistic touches, rich and vibrant writing — and appropriately oversized, comic-book performances from a terrific cast.

It’s gratifying to see that Hunters is doing more complicated stuff than the pulp fiction Nazi-hunting it implies on the box; in between the bright colors and droll needle drops, there’s a sense of grief and memory and loss that underpins all of the escapist fun the show feeds you.

The majority of Hunters works — at least in the first five episodes.

Hunters‘ usage of many of these same techniques [as Watchmen] sometimes feels scattershot, slapped together carelessly, a rainstorm of ideas without the want of a unifying umbrella. The show is still worth your time and mental energy — and its fifth episode ends with some character twists that will make me keep watching — but be warned. Blunt times call for blunt stories — and this story is interested in making blunt impacts in every single direction.

Created by David Weil and executive produced by Jordan Peele, the show is audacious, tonally complex, not always in control of its message, visually arresting, and, particularly in its grim flashbacks to the brutalities and the courage in the death camps, moving.

It may not deliver on all cylinders, but there is enough of a spark here to keep the car running.

While there’s still five more episodes left for the series to make a topical point about the re-proliferation of Nazis, so far “Hunters” is more concerned with spinning a good yarn. Its sturdy construction should be able to deliver on that front, but it remains to be seen if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Proudly outrageous thriller set in 1977. [2 - 15 Mar 2020, p.9]

Richly inventive and also frequently appalling. ... Matters like this aside, along with the graphic torture scenes, there’s much that’s compelling about this buoyant and ambitious series, not least its detailed picture of the Nazi-hunting team pursuing leads.

I recommend the show—it’s smart and unpredictable—but I don’t recommend watching too many consecutively. It’s a lot.

Hunters is such an enticing premise as to overcome its execution problems, at least for a while. But the tone of this Amazon series -- which counts Al Pacino among its ensemble cast -- varies wildly, leaving behind a show that isn't bad, but which really should be a whole lot better.

Good Pacino, skillful pulp, but an impossible balancing act.

Schlock it may be, but it's schlock of the watchable variety.

The entire time I was watching the premiere, I was thinking that the show should have been called Avengers: Nazi Hunters.

With so much ground to cover, so many characters to introduce and so much Nazi blood to shed, the script barely has time to make us care about any of them, even with a 90-minute opening episode. A high percentage of the jokes are duds, and the Hunters have none of the heart and cool that made Tarantino’s Basterds oddly likeable.

This is a ballsy, unnerving, entertaining, overreaching show, one likely to provoke and annoy in equal measure. It may require an almost Talmudic level of study to determine if Hunters is good or bad for the Jews, but I'm willing to participate.

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.

Hunters directly imitates Quentin Tarantino's distinctive style but lacks his sophistication and mastery of craft. A Tarantino film can make you feel like you've seen all these puzzle pieces before, but never assembled in this way. Hunters makes you feel like you're watching a really long Tarantino knockoff that lacks the director's humor and audaciousness.

Pacino provides a balanced through-line as even-tempered radical Meyer. ... The rest of the cast is playing a loose collection of thinly drawn archetypes (perhaps even stereotypes), which works better for some characters than others. ... Hunters finally hits its thematic stride in its fifth episode.

When it isn’t plumbing a well of agony and loss, Hunters wants to be an arch thriller-comedy of unlikely allies, a tone that clashes with the series’s more serious, mournful inquests. In the five episodes I’ve seen, Weil struggles to find the show’s balance, hitting really resonant notes in one stretch of an episode before clanging into leaden Tarantino-lite territory in the next.

The intermingling of real-world horror and fantasy revenge is nothing new, and when it works, it can rattle audiences in the best possible way. (Executive producer Peele’s own “Get Out” and “Us” are prime recent examples.) “Hunters” is far from sloppy, and it’s rarely dull. ... Here, though, it’s more a case of misjudged satire and mood-swing whiplash.

“Hunters” is a series that feels like it’s finding its way, as it explores explosive territory with a tone that lurches from darkly comic to grimly violent.

The shifting tones and conflicting storytelling severely limit any chance for this series to thrill you, let alone keep your attention.

It’s a fast, frenetic show that’s all over the place — emotionally, violently and conspiratorially. Its darkly humorous bent competes with its righteous sincerity.

Having gotten Pacino, though, “Hunters” doesn’t do much with him, or with its premise or the rest of its stellar cast. He’s fine. ... But there’s something generic about Meyer, and about “Hunters,” even as the show tries very hard to be singular.

Humanity is misplaced and forgotten throughout, the show more interested in presenting the badassness of “cathartic” revenge than anything worthwhile. Not to mention its simplistic look at injustice or righting wrongs, and it’s the crucial missing element that prevents “Hunters” from achieving any kind of greatness.

That's Hunters: the waste of a heavyweight cast on a smarmy, smart-assed and sportively sadistic wallow in 1970s anti-Nazi paranoia. As violent and tasteless as any Quentin Tarantino project (and yes, Inglorious Basterds is definitely a point of reference) but without the underlying talent, Hunters' only likely achievement is triggering a wave of common prayers across religions and cultures for the continued good health of Pacino so that this mess isn't remembered as his last project.

The show’s far-fetched conceit that Nazis were behind most of the conspiratorial diplomatic tragedies of the Cold War era, the thin mystery of the characters’ relationships, and the wan pull of their wacky spy hijinks weren’t enough to justify the ideological Nazi parade on display.

To be sure, there is solid acting on the dark side by Dylan Baker, who plays a former concentration-camp guard, and Greg Austin as a next-gen Nazi who’s a linchpin in the Fourth Reich conspiracy that’s led by a female “colonel” (Lena Olin). But the Nazi side of Hunters is driven by a creative decision that I find questionable and which, along with the relentless thrum of torture and bloodshed, finally drove me away from this show.

It’s too cool and self-conscious for its own good, and seems to revel in any and all deaths on screen, regardless of whether the victims are “guilty” or not.

Show creator David Weil would no doubt argue that nothing here is any more outrageous than the cruelties visited on the Jews in the camps, and the Nazi-slaying has a cathartic quality. But turning it into schlocky popcorn entertainment sets a very odd tone.

As with too many limited series, they had a feature film’s supply of story and (comic book) wit, saddled it with far too many distracting and less interesting outside of the leads, and then slow-walked the entire affair to a genuinely inevitable conclusion. ... Not everything Jordan Peele slaps his brand on is worth our time.

Meyer’s group is filled out with a collection of second- and third-hand caricatures, not types taken from movies but types taken from movies about movies. ... Breaking the fourth wall is meant to be a moment of confrontation, but by that point, the show has made it all but impossible for anyone to see themselves in its overwrought depictions.

Schlocky. ... Hunters is a strange show, all aestheticized violence and infantile philosophizing. ... What’s most maddening about Hunters is that much of it works in individual pieces, even though the whole is a sweaty, overseasoned smorgasbord.

The sprawling and excessive amount of plot, coupled with constant hopscotching through different locations and eras — announced, always, in massive, red Mindhunter-style fonts — isn’t even the show’s biggest problem. Hunters’ downfall is its insistence on swinging for all the fences without proving it can even hit a single.

Mostly, the show’s choice to make all forms of violence entertaining overshadows that nuance. At worst, Hunters can lose its antifascist chutzpah and start to come across as equal-opportunity sadistic. ... There seems to be so much distance between what Hunters wants to say and what it actually expresses.

“Hunters” is above all else an exercise in genre pastiche, blending ultraviolence with brutally unfunny comedy. It strands its lead, Logan Lerman, in a grave and painstakingly emotional plotline.

“Hunters” works in black-and-white and stereotypes, hiding in the bygone, but today anti-Semitism is on the rise and American Nazis apparently include “very fine people” according to one prominent source. Perhaps now wasn’t the time for a wildly uneven, superficial, comic book-type treatment of this particularly sick and unfortunately still-relevant dynamic.

Hunters traffics in insipid dramatic cliché. The result is by-the-numbers drama that veers every so often into baffling pulp, as though the series is cobbled together from mismatched parts.