Hunters: Al Pacino serves up revenge to Nazis with lashings of Seventies nostalgia

Is Hunters' nostalgic and comic book-esque style its main flaw? 
Amazon Studios, Prime Video
Alastair McKay21 February 2020

There are things to like about Hunters, the absurd drama in which Al Pacino leads a group of Jews exacting revenge for the Holocaust in a stylish version of the recent past.

Al Pacino is one of these things, because he is Al Pacino, and it’s always a pleasure to observe his outsized characterisations, and if the chips had fallen differently he could have been Harvey Keitel hawking one of his old parts to sell insurance.

But Pacino’s not the main thing. The main thing is the style, which is bright nostalgia with comic book scruples and a Tarantino-esque disregard for anything approaching the painful complexities of adult life. That’s also the main flaw.

How do we arrive at this puzzling duality? There are two possibilities at play. In one, the best way to approach the idea that anti-Semitism is alive and well is to drop it into an infantile revenge drama where the hunted become the hunters, conspiring to exact justice upon their evil persecutors. “You know what the best revenge is?” Pacino’s Nazi-hunter asks. “Revenge.”

The Seventies are unspooling like a pop art dream in the series
Amazon Studios, Prime Video

But it also seems possible that the notion of reducing the lingering echoes of the Holocaust to a video-game torture challenge is a less fabulous conceit than it may at first appear. Maybe there is no good revenge.

Let’s have a look at the opening scene, while respecting the request of Amazon that no details should be disclosed. It’s a barbecue. Very American. Very Seventies. It’s beautiful. There’s a swimming pool, a man and his meat, a sky as blue as Burt Lancaster’s dreams, and a cast of unreal people in flares and flowers.

Television shows in 2020

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There are moustaches, sexist banter, background chatter about The Six Million Dollar Man. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, a Nazi. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Motivation? A young man, Jonah (Logan Lerman), witnesses his grandmother’s murder. The killing is dismissed as a robbery gone wrong, which is understandable, as the Seventies are unspooling like a pop art dream in which kids discuss Star Wars, cops investigate the Son of Sam murders, and the boardwalks of Coney Island are patrolled by vigilante guardian angels.

Unspooling slowly, because the first episode is feature length, as the kid is drawn into the belly of the gang of Jewish revenge superheroes led by Meyer Offerman (Pacino). It looks good, it plays uneasily. You can choose sides.

Hunters is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video

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