HUNTERS
CREATORDavid Weil
CASTAl Pacino, Logan Lerman, Lena OlinPLOTAfter his grandmother’s untimely death, New
Yorker Jonah Heidelbaum discovers she was part
of a group of vigilantes, led by concentration
camp survivor Meyer Offerman, dedicated to
killing Nazi war criminals now hiding in America.
Jonah’s keen to join their mission, but with the
FBI and Hitler’s newly formed Fourth Reich on
their tail, their scumbag-hunting days may be
over before they’ve barely begun.OUTNOW/AMAZON PRIME
★★★★ EPISODES VIEWED1 OF 10[TV]
NAZIS ARE THE perfect villains in popular
entertainment because they have no redeeming
qualities whatsoever. They are the worst of the
worst, the vilest of the vile. And their onscreen
deaths – hopefully, as painful as possible – will
always be greeted with collective cheers and
fi st-pumping from audiences.
“I hate Illinois Nazis!” proclaimed Jake
before he and his brother Elwood tried to run
down a bunch of them in The Blues Brothers.
However, those swastika-wielding wannabes
couldn’t hold a candle to the Nazis of 1977
America we encounter in Hunters. It only takes
fi ve minutes for us to realise they are, to be blunt,
a right pack of bastards. So we’re immediately onthe side of anyone wanting to put them six feet
underground...like the merry band of Nazi
hunters led by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino).
It’s been a very good 12 months for the
79-year-old screen legend. After his acclaimed
performance as Jimmy Hoffa inThe Irishman,
he puts in another blinder as Meyer, a driven-
and-ruthless executioner beneath his “kindly old
rich guy” exterior. He befriends young Jonah
(Logan Lerman) at the funeral of his beloved
grandmother, who was murdered in her home.
It seems she knew her killer who was, we soon
discover, not a burglar but rather a former prison
guard at Auschwitz during World War Two, who
silenced her before he could be exposed.
Jonah learns that his gran knew Meyer in
the camp. Decades later, the pair secretly ran
a team tasked with eliminating Nazis who fled
to America after the war. Avenging her death
drives Jonah into Meyer’s blood-soaked arms.
“The best revenge is to live well,” Meyer
initially tells him, but later corrects himself
to say, “The best revenge is revenge.”
After seeing fi rsthand the brutal behaviour
of the bad guys we’re inclined to agree with him.
By the end of the fi rst episode, Jonah has
joined Meyer’s cause just as their lethal activities
are starting to be noticed by both FBI agent
Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton) – investigating
the mysterious gassing death of a NASA scientist
in Florida – and a band of neo-Nazis led by The
Colonel (Lena Olin), anxious to eliminate any
opposition before they jump-start a new Nazi
regime in the good o’ US of A.
The storyline moves at a cracking pace,
so you don’t have to think too hard about how
preposterous the whole thing is. The humour is
blacker than black, the violence is sudden andunsettling – you’ll never look at the benign
sports of chess, darts and tenpin bowling in quite
the same way again – but the show is held
together by superlative performances, with
Pacino leading the way.
In the end, Hunters poses an important
question: how far are people willing to go
to seek justice and what will they lose in the
process? Or as Friedrich Nietzsche, a German
philosopher nearly as wise as Jake Blues, once
put it, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become
a monster.” DAN LENNARDVERDICT Hunters hits the ground running
with a punch-to-the-gut opening sequence
and never lets up in its movie-length premiere.
It also features the greatest bowling alley
scene since The Big Lebowski. Pacino adds
a layer of class to the vicious proceedings.ON SCREEN
Top: Worst AA meeting ever. Above: Meyer (Al Pacino) and
Jonah (Logan Lerman) discuss Nazis...and chess.