Worth: $12.00
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Cast:
Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvany, Dylan Baker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Udo Kier
Intro:
Amazon’s Nazi hunting thriller ends with a muddled tone but earnest intention.
When approaching a piece of media that holds its foundation on the Holocaust, the first element that must be given attention to is the tone and message of your story. It is a hard line to walk when dealing with the subject matter of the genocide of approximately six million people, and it is very easy to turn something rooted in authenticity into tawdry, exploitative entertainment. Prime’s Hunters seems to be playing a balancing act between both those outcomes.
The second (and now final) season of this conspiracy thriller picks up a couple of years after the events of the first, putting a scruffier Logan Lerman back in the lead chair to trot a globe-trotting adventure of Nazi hunting and Fourth-Reich halting schemes. Jonah Heidelbaum is all grown up, and the plight of the Hunters is more important than ever.
While it has moments of fun, intrigue, and heart, the problem resides for the most part in its tone and pacing. The bloat on offer in season two is nothing short of suffocating. Despite its truncated runtime relative to its first outing, it has an inability to decide between being a quippy, maximalist gore-fest, or a lamentation on Jewish resilience and reclamation. It is a troubling dissertation that leaves nothing but tonal whiplash for the viewer.
Showrunner David Weil is well-intentioned for the most part. The conception of this show was founded on a need for Jewish heroes to be presented in a higher form than their marginalisation. For a small chunk of it, the show succeeds at that intention. The technical sides of the series occasionally let a more creative approach seep through; yellow hues pulsate the mise-en-scene – a reclamation for the yellow badges that branded and alienated an entire race of people.
Most characters have minimal personality beyond what the plot demands of them, but the narrative still gives them enough agency to feel like the comic-book-inspired underdogs they were going for. The more fantastical elements are sadly never allowed to breathe within the confines of Amazon’s industrial content creation; stylistic leanings that could have lent better to the themes that the show is approaching.
While Weil’s narrative-changing intentions for Jewish representation make for enticing television, it comes at the expense of Peak TV fluff and conspiracy-thriller dribble. The plot of each episode takes a routine approach to its construction: find a lead on a Nazi, construct a fanciful way to torture their target, add a dash of group infighting, and then on to the next lead.
The difference this season has over its first, is in the arc for Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman, and the inclusion of a clandestine Adolf Hitler hiding in isolation. Both these elements lead to either farce or redundancy for the most part, and the tone never settles on what could be a strong and effective baseline. Pacino is mostly relegated to flashbacks that barely justifies his reappearance.
While the authentic and more realised themes come to fruition in the final two episodes of the series, it comes far too late – the 16 hours preceding it couldn’t decide if we should be laughing at Jennifer Jason-Leigh sticking Nazi eyeballs on a European monument or crying at muted flashbacks through the horrors of the Jewish plight during WWII.
While Hunters attempted to explore the morality of fighting evil with evil, its inconsistency never allowed its vision to shine with fidelity. It’s a wonderful idea to make the marginalised the heroes of their own stories, and every actor does bring a level of pathos, but having a stronger foundation would’ve made for a far more realised final product.
