The new Al Pacino series on Amazon, “Hunters,” feels a little like “Super Heroes Get Revenge for the Holocaust.” Pacino plays a survivor who seems part Simon Wiesenthal, part Bruce Wayne. I kept waiting for somebody to send out the Bat Signal.
On behalf of Jews and gentiles, too, let us all say in chorus, “Oy, gevalt.“
I started cringing when Jeannie Berlin, grandmother of the show’s main character, Jonah (Logan Lerman), opens her mouth and out comes an Eastern European Yiddish accent that could make Molly Goldberg sound like Mrs. Miniver.
No, wait, the cringing actually started earlier — in fact, the first episode’s opening scene. A Nazi in hiding, formerly the “butcher” of a concentration camp, is throwing a barbecue for friends in his beautiful “Maryland” backyard when he’s outed by a young woman who remembers him from the camp and starts hollering.
It’s reminiscent of the chilling scene in “Marathon Man” where the old woman spots ex-Nazi Lawrence Olivier on the street in New York’s Diamond District and begins shrieking, “It’s Szell! Szell! Somebody help me.” She’s stumbled upon the Angel of Death.
Go look for it on YouTube, it’ll make you shudder. But the “Hunters” version feels like a cheap copy played by amateurs, especially when the former Nazi, having been exposed, takes out a gun and murders all the guests.
See, he can’t take a chance. It’s the 1970s, and he’s not only a Nazi in hiding , it turns out he’s multi-tasking as the U.S. secretary of state. After all, what better place for a Nazi to hide than the heart of all international politics?!
Luckily for him, he’s got a Nazi pal who shows up after thekillings to help with an alibi. Later, this creep turns up in a D.C.laundromat, where he tells a black woman doing her laundry nearby, “When youdon’t separate the whites from the colors, the colors always bleed.”
Get it? Too subtle?
If it’s subtlety you want, you’ve come to the wrong place.After one of these Nazi butchers murders his beloved grandma, Jonah drops in ata local luncheonette. He orders the chicken soup. But then he starts screamingat the poor counter guy who serves it to him.
Why? “It’s not hers,” Jonah mutters.
It’s not grandma’s chicken soup, he means. So by all means, let’s make a scene.
And our cringing doesn’t stop. Some of it’s based on comic book-depth characters and some on fictionalized atrocities, as if the real Holocaust crimes weren’t bad enough. In “Hunters,” there’s a death camp scene where naked men and women are forced to stand in position as chess pieces. They’re each killed as their chess piece is knocked off the big board.
You know what’s surprising here? The quality actors who signed on for this series. There’s Pacino, Carol Kane, Lena Olin, Josh Radnor and Saul Rubinek. As they pursue all these Nazis who are trying to jump-start a Fourth Reich, they’re part of an ethnic-mix all-America team that includes a Vietnam vet and a woman who’s a kind of bad-ass Pam Grier type.
Does it feel mainly like “Batman” or “The Mod Squad”? Tough call. Either way, you’ll feel mainly like cringing.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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