Pros: Unhackneyed theme; colorful ambiance of America in the 70s. last century; good game by Logan Lerman Cons: Secondary; logical and temporal inconsistencies; a somewhat naive view of the actions of the American authorities at the end of World War II; crazy conspiracy theories; inappropriate satirical inserts; not a very correct attitude towards the history of the Holocaust; completely disastrous ending of Hunters / “Hunters”
Genre thriller, drama
Creator David Weale
Cast: Logan Lerman (Jonah Heidelbaum), Al Pacino (Meyer Offerman), Jerrica Hinton (Millie Malone), Dylan Baker (Biff Simpson), Lena Olin (Colonel), Tiffany Boone (Roxy Jones), Saul Rubinek (Murry Markowitz), Carol Kane (Mindy Markowitz), Josh Radnor (Lonnie Flash), Lewis Ozawa (Joe Torrance), Kate Mulvany (Sister Harriet), etc.
Amazon Prime Video Channel
Year of release 2020–
Episodes 10
Site IMDb
A simple Jewish guy, Jonah Heidelbaum, lives an ordinary life for a high school student in New York in 1977. He discusses Star Wars, which has just appeared in theaters, with friends, quietly sells weed, reads comics, listens to rock, and tries to please the girl from the neighboring yard. On the night when an unknown person sneaks into their house and kills his grandmother, everything will change for Jonah. He soon learns that his quiet grandmother Ruth was part of a group of Nazi hunters tracking down and killing war criminals hiding in the United States. Jonah will want to avenge the death of his grandmother and will join a group led by the eccentric elderly millionaire Meyer Offerman, an acquaintance of Ruth Heidelbaum from the time of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Well, the first five or six episodes of Hunters even look interesting if you close your eyes to the glaring discrepancy between Jonah Heidelbaum’s age and the time that has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, as well as the constant problems with the teleportation of the heroes and the logic of their actions. Moreover, both the Nazis and the hunters themselves act completely illogically. What’s also a little alarming is that, structurally, Hunters literally repeats the anti-superhero series The Boys from the same Amazon. Only here, instead of bad supers, there are bad Nazis, and they are opposed by the same ordinary people, who are joined by a young boy who doesn’t know how to do anything, but wants to avenge the death of his beloved… grandmother. It’s a strange coincidence, to be honest.
Further we go, worse it becomes. Starting with the fifth episode, American viewers are told what a disgusting and immoral act of their government Operation Paperclip was and that going to the moon does not at all atone for the previous actions of Wernher von Braun. It’s doubly offensive for von Braun, because quite recently he was already slandered in the series For All Mankind from Apple. I am not ready to judge whether the flight to the moon will atone for the crimes of Wernher von Braun during the war, but I am absolutely sure that Operation Paperclip was the only correct and very timely decision of the Truman government. It seems that in the United States in 2020 they began to forget how cannibalistic the Soviet regime was, which, by the way, started World War II together with Germany, that is, the Holocaust. And in atrocities against its own people and national minorities, the USSR simply had no equal. It’s scary to imagine what the best minds of the Third Reich could create in collaboration with the communist monster and what consequences this could lead to for the whole world.
Somewhere in the middle, Hunters begins to finally slide into some kind of crazy conspiracy theory, more suitable for a comic book series. Moreover, from the very beginning, the authors of the film are quite free with well-known facts concerning the Holocaust and, in particular, the Auschwitz death concentration camp. The fictional scenes depicting the Germans as some kind of caricatured villains from comic books drew attention even in Poland, and the administration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum spoke very unflatteringly about the creators of the series. After all, the most terrible thing about Auschwitz was precisely the rational component that the Germans tried to introduce into the systematic extermination of people. There was absolutely no need to invent some incredible chess games involving camp prisoners armed with knives. Such embellishment of a terrible and in reality story is quite offensive.
Well, Hunters ends like some kind of unfunny farce. The last, tenth episode is simply difficult to watch. Let’s just say that in the game Zombie Army 4: Dead War, where Hitler, who returned from hell, raised hordes of zombie Nazis to conquer the world, it makes more sense than in the last series of Hunters.
Frankly, Hunters is that rare case when I feel incredibly sorry for the 10 hours of my life spent watching this series. No one will return them to me, I hope that at least this review will allow you to avoid a senseless waste of time.
Conclusion:
An initially intriguing series about Nazis and Jewish avengers turned out to be a stupid and unfunny parody
