The Hunters - a review.
Al Pacino and stylishly-booted whippersnappers hunt down Nazis in the US
Why do we watch TV? To distract and educate ourselves? For water cooler chat? To tick off a title from the To Watch list getting ever-longer in our phone notes? Maybe it's to escape all the bloody ‘likes’ on social media and in real life. Yes, one of the most appealing aspects of watching TV, rather than reality TV, or indeed reality itself, is people not peppering sentences with 'like', 'literally', 'to be honest' and 'I'm not gonna lie' that stains modern conversation with the immovability of moths from unwashed socks drawers. Do people even notice? Is it to make themselves feel more intelligent, by using 'big' words? Anyway, it poses an issue for scriptwriters because no characters on TV talk in this irritatingly speculative way, although is such a relief that we’ll sit through any tripe.
But, is Hunters tripe? Well, it looks very pretty with those contemporary giant letters depicting a place or year on the screen, and a wardrobe department that presumably ignores phone calls from the finance department. It’s lushly filmed, with the same aesthetic as the Umbrella Academy and other no-expenses-spared-streaming-lead-shows. (No spoiler) it’s clear from the start that we’re all here to see what Hitler might look like in 1978 following a lengthy sojourn in Argentina. Of course, he’s an actor, but as is often the case in these matters, is so realistic (mainly due to the greyed Chaplin moustache and the distinctive undercut) that it’s hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. Mind you, a Hitler in hiding without shaving his moustache is like Daft Punk as undercover cops in chrome space helmets. Surely he’d have made an effort to look less like , well, the most hated man on earth, but then if he had then no one would be watching the Hunters.
The Hunters is on its second season by Amazon, the online shop, TV production company, and recently self-appointed arbitrators of free speech (their moral compass over tax-evading is less sensitive than their love for Meghan Windsor). The show’s premise is a brilliant one: ex-Nazis living brazenly in public, hosting BBQs and soirees until one of the (Nazi) hunters track them down to kill them. With apparently hundreds of high-ranking Nazi officials in 1977 New York City, conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the U.S, their overriding challenge seems not to be the logistical challenges of establishing a new Reich, but to avoid being killed be the predictably ethnically diverse team of hunters. The Nazis are so easily dispatched and the next one searched for that it eventually feels like children playing Pokemon Go.
The series could have been so much more. There’s no mention of the possibility of ex-Nazis infiltrating the WEF, the UN, the IMF, or hell, even the WWE. In fact, writing this has revealed the World Wrestling Federation changed its name to WWE after losing a law case against the World Wildlife Federation, presumably due to disappointed anthropologists sitting through Mickey Wripwreck slamming Diamond Dallas Page to the canvass whilst wondering when the pandas slowly chewing bamboo might show up. The implication that wrestlers can be beaten by people apparently having crawled from haystacks and talking in hushed voices is a hush-up this series fails to explore, alongside various other potentially interesting avenues.
The Hunters could have explored Operation Paperclip, a US intelligence program taking more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. Instead, the writers seem more interested in shoehorning in a pointless bi-racial lesbian relationship that simmers with the sexual energy of an abandoned igloo. In fact, they clearly paid Al Pacino so much money there was no budget left for any more decent actors (Udo Kier as Hitler excluded).
Sadly the challenge provided by Nazi henchmen is lame, leaving it a pretty mess of set pieces we’ve all seen before, with gun shots that kill the ‘baddies’ with a single bullet, yet ‘goodies’ survive point-blank woundings. As with superhero movies it’s hard to care when no one ‘good’ can be killed. Admittedly one of the characters has some shady past to shake things up a bit although it’s so implausible amongst a circus of improbability that the makers may have not even bothered filming the final episodes.