Hunters (Season Two-2023) * * *

Starring:  Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kate Mulvaney, Udo Kier, Lena Olin, Dylan Baker, Jerrika Hinton, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Carol Kane, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa

The first season of Amazon Prime's Hunters debuted in 2020 and, in what is an eternity in streaming, premieres its second and final season here in early 2023.   Like the first season, Hunters centers around a group of Nazi hunters who track and kill escaped Nazis in 1970's New York, Paris, or wherever else their seemingly unlimited travel budget takes them.   This season picks up in 1979, two years after Jonah (Lerman) who was recruited into the group in the first season and discovers the leader Meyer Offerman (Pacino) was indeed a former Nazi who killed the real Meyer and founded the group.  Why did Meyer create a Nazi-hunting group of assassins whose mission was to find The Wolf, who it turns out was Meyer?  The show never explains, even in season two in which Pacino's Meyer returns in flashbacks.  Why would Meyer bring attention to his former identity?   I enjoyed the first season and for the most part this one, but Meyer's fate seems more like a writer's swerve for swerve's sake.  

Season one of Hunters ended also with a twist that Adolf Hitler (Kier) is still alive and living in Argentina and the sinister Colonel (Olin) is actually Eva Braun.   Joe (Ozawa), the Asian-American hunter was kidnapped and brought to Argentina for the Big Reveal, in the years since was made into Hitler's butler.  An Asian man as Hitler's right-hand man and later a Jewish man acting as Hitler's lawyer (more on that later)?  Is Hitler softening in his old age?  Eva thinks this may be the case and conspires with neo-Nazi fanatic Travis (Austin) to usurp the plans for a Fourth Reich from under her husband.   Jennifer Jason Leigh appears on the scene as a fellow Nazi hunter who is his long-lost aunt Rose.   Why did she spend so many years apart from her sister (Logan's grandmother who was killed in the first season) without revealing that she was alive?   There is an explanation of sorts, but not a convincing one.   However, there is a chilling, yet engaging sequence in which Sister Harriet (Mulvaney) confronts the dying man who murdered her father in a concentration camp.  The scene unfolds in unexpected ways which allows us to question how we would handle such a situation, especially if the murderer tearfully repented his sin.  

Despite the unresolved plot holes, the idea of Nazi hunters exacting violent vengeance on the ones who escaped justice remains a solid one which propels the show along.   Hitler's ultimate fate is handled not with a bullet, but with a trial in which Hitler is charged with crimes against humanity (duh).   The show was inexorably headed in that direction instead of simply putting a bullet in Hitler's head and being done with it, but is there a realistic way to handle just how much of a mindfuck it would be if Hitler were discovered to have been hiding in South America three decades after he was believed to have committed suicide?  Maybe there isn't a way to convey just how important and historic such a trial would be, but Hunters doesn't quite capture that.   Perhaps there isn't a way it could be done, although the prosecutor does a nice job of trapping Hitler with his denials that he played any role in his own Holocaust.   Just imagine you are the prosecutor who is tasked with cross-examining one of the most evil men in history.   It would seem so surreal that there wouldn't be words to describe it.   Hunters tries and you have to give the show that much credit.