Starring: Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Josh Radnor, Dylan Baker, Lena Olin, Greg Austin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, Kate Mulvany, Tiffany Boone, Jerrika Hinton, Jeannie Berlin, Louis Ozawa
Hunters is Tarantinoesque in its form, delivery, and tweaking of history as either a plot swerve or just because it can. Those who aren't fans of grotesque violence should look elsewhere for their entertainment. Does it have uneven patches? Yes. Are some of the gimmicky bits used as comic relief a bit over the top? Yes. Do some of the characters suffer from selective morality by mowing down nameless Nazi soldiers at will, but pausing to consider the moral implications when it comes time to kill the bigwigs? Yes, and that can be annoying. But the rest of Hunters flies past those pesky blind spots with its byzantine plot which at first seems so simple, but grows into something bigger than one season could handle.
Hunters opens in 1977 America where the nation's Under Secretary of State Biff Simpson (Baker) is holding a seemingly innocuous cookout with his family and friends. Biff boasts about having the ear of President Carter and loves his life, until a Jewish woman arrives with husband in tow who quivers at the sight of Biff. She cries and screams that Biff is a monster; accusing him of being a Nazi death camp commandant. Biff denies the claims at first, but soon a bullet in the heads of all of the party guests leaves no doubt about Biff's former identity. Biff has been a Nazi mole in the government for years, and he is but one part of a massive plot hatched by displaced Nazis to begin "The Fourth Reich". The crumbling of the Third Reich in 1945 serves to fuel the Nazi desire to reign supreme again.
Cut to Brooklyn, where a teenage Jewish kid named Jonah (Lerman) is soon a witness to the murder of his beloved grandmother (Berlin), a Holocaust survivor, in cold blood in their home. Seeking vengeance, Jonah crosses path with an old family friend, rich Jewish power broker Meyer Offerman (Pacino), who slowly admits Jonah into his own family of Nazi hunters who seek out and wipe out some of the Nazis who have escaped to America. Their methods aren't pretty. One former Nazi scientist is gassed in her own shower in Florida, while others are dispensed with equal cruelty.
Meyer's group is a bunch of outsiders who have one thing in common: their hatred for Nazis and their desire to dispense ugly justice. There's Sister Harriet (Mulvany),a former MI-6 operative disguised as (I think) a nun. Also aboard is Lonny Flash (Radnor), a struggling Jewish actor whose new employment opportunity is killing Nazis, old married couple Murray and Mindy (Rubinek and Kane) whose child was coldly shot to death in a concentration camp, Roxy (Boone), a black woman who could easily pass for Cleopatra Jones, Joe (Ozawa), a Japanese-American Vietnam vet with lethal skills, and of course Meyer himself, who funds the operation and takes a hands-on approach to his work. He isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.
Jonah struggles with his conscience as he dives deeper into his new line of work, which falls into the selective morality stuff I mentioned earlier. This can be draining. You're either in or you're out, kid. The haunted conscience thing is distracting. Hunters, though, doesn't allow much time to dwell on such trivialities. The Nazis are led by The Colonel (Olin), who coldly and calculatingly runs the show from the shadows. One of her favorite operatives is Travis (Austin), an American neo-Nazi who is frighteningly passionate about the Nazi cause. This guy is ruthless and scary, with steely, cold, and unforgiving eyes.
The vast Nazi plot involves their use of a shell corporation to distribute corn syrup to the masses, killing millions in the process and making it easier to conquer those left behind. The Hunters' job is to halt the said plot, which is hard enough without an FBI agent (Hinton) snooping around wondering why senior citizens who immigrated from Europe are suddenly dropping dead. Hunters has a distinct feel for its time and place, a period in which it was still very possible to find Nazis who were fugitives from justice.
Al Pacino, now 79, relishes his big moments as Meyer, who had a complex previous relationship with Jonah's grandmother and is also a concentration camp survivor. Some of the more grueling moments of Hunters are the flashbacks to the camps, which provides context to the current day hunters' actions. Their methods of dispatching the Nazis are Inglourious Basterds times ten. I was halfway expecting to see Brad Pitt appear to help out Meyer's gang.
Despite any momentary misgivings, Hunters gives us ultimately evil villains with no redeeming qualities whom we would like to see vanquished, and a group of colorful protagonists whose mission is to do the vanquishing. There is a swerve in the season finale which I still can't fully agree with. It is simply too contrived to be fully effective, and then in Hunters fashion, another swerve comes along to make us forget all about the first one. Your mileage may vary on how much violence you can stand, but Hunters is never boring.
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