Hunters (2020)

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.