The Problem With Amazon’s Nazi-Hunters Show

The star of this Baudrillardian spectacle is indubitably Al Pacino playing Meyer Offerman, the serene overseer of a band of vigilante Nazi hunters in 1977 New York. But the show, created by the relative newcomer David Weil and produced by Jordan Peele, is loyal to comic-book origin stories, and so the central character is Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), a sullen, bratty teenager who lives with his grandmother, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), gets beaten up by bullies, and indulges in endless debates about superhero ethics with his two best friends. Unlike, say, Peter Parker, Jonah sells weed to support his family, which Ruth implores him to stop doing, telling him that every decision in life comes down to a choice between darkness and light. One night, Ruth is murdered in front of Jonah, which leads him to Meyer, and to the revelation that his mild-mannered bubbe, a concentration-camp survivor, had been secretly working to find and kill Nazis living in America. (Those Nazis have survived to form a new, Hydra-like group bent on malevolence and world domination.) Forget the Talmudic prescription for living well; the best revenge, Meyer tells Jonah with acid relish, is simply “revenge.”

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An early problem of the show is that the now-dead Nazi hunter Ruth is a much more compelling character than Jonah, who sulks his way into Meyer’s camp (Hunters occasionally alludes to the fact that Jonah is a brilliant mathematician and a master code-breaker but largely just presents him as a chump). At a Television Critics Association panel earlier this year, Weil spoke about how the inspiration for the show was his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whose stories always struck the young Weil as having a comic-book quality in their pitting of good against evil. That graphic novels have plumbed the villainous depths of Nazism isn’t a coincidence: The Third Reich’s fetishization of symbols, combined with its unimaginable cruelty, suits the visual punch and narrative simplicity of the medium.

But as much as Hunters borrows from comic books, it also pilfers heavily from another genre, yielding a confounding tone. Weil’s storytelling structure might be ripped from Marvel, but its style is grind house. Not the sexualized torture porn of movies like Love Camp 7 and Last Orgy of the Third Reich, but the numbing, vapid violence of exploitation films and particularly Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. For all of Jonah’s ethical quandaries about violence, Hunters is pretty clear on the fact that killing Nazis isn’t just defensible—it’s also fun. Why wouldn’t it be, when the show’s foundational material offers such clear lines between heroes and villains, and such cheerful capacity for carnage?

As Jonah meets Meyer’s squad, Hunters leans all the way into its ’70s setting, introducing each character in cinematic, B-movie-trailer style. There’s Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), a nun and former MI6 agent (it pays not to think too hard about why she’s a nun, as her habits all end mid-thigh and she’s fairly murderous). There’s Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boone), a character more thinly drawn and trope-y than Foxxy Cleopatra. Similarly thin is Louis Ozawa Changchien’s Joe Torrance, a martial-arts expert and Korean War veteran who teaches Jonah how to fight. Carol Kane and Saul Rubinek play Mindy and Murray Markowitz, a married couple with indeterminate skill sets but enormous charm. How I Met Your Mother’s Josh Radnor is unreasonably delightful as Lonny Flash, a down-on-his-luck actor who’s supposedly a master of disguise, even though his handlebar mustache would seem to render him unmistakable.