Fancy some Tarantino-style pulp violence, with a ragtag band of 1970s misfits living out their violent revenge fantasies on leftover Nazis from the Third Reich? Well, turns out neither Amazon Studios nor a huge audience did, really, because the second season of Hunters – which begins on Friday – will be its last.
Partly, you’d imagine, that’s because the first was so tonally all over the place. Creator David Weil’s desire to invoke the horrors of Holocaust and then mete out extreme comedy justice was so plain odd, that he probably only got the green light for a return if he promised to go completely meshuggeneh and hunt for the biggest Nazi of them all. Yes, Hunters season 2 finds Adolf Hitler alive and if not well, then greying of iconic moustache in South America.
The Hunters, who include Logan Lerman as the complex and traumatised Jonah, Kate Mulvany as a brilliantly badass and completely untrustworthy nun, and Jerrika Hinton as a rogue FBI agent, get wind of The Fuhrer’s existence, and get the gang back together to exact the biggest revenge possible.
‘We find Hitler,’ says Jonah, once mild-mannered, now hirsute and hanging out in European bordellos, ‘and everything we’ve done, everything we’ve become, will have been worth it.’
And so begins a continent-crossing hunt with more than a nod to Killing Eve: there are huge location markers, a knowing soundtrack (recently removed eyeballs are placed on a sculpture to a Yiddish version of Kelis’s Milkshake) and a fantastic commitment to costume, period detail and set pieces – including a brutally funny Sound Of Music pastiche.
It’s great fun, and because the motivations of the characters were dealt with in season one, there are far fewer uneasy shifts in content.
The only awkwardness comes from the return of Al Pacino. Not that he’s anything other than brilliant as the Hunter-in-Chief, Meyer Offerman. But, er, he was killed in season one at the end of a clunking plot twist. Shoehorning him in here in flashback feels either a contractual obligation or opportunist.
All of which sums up Hunters’ problem. There are some great performances – Jennifer Jason Leigh thrives as a new addition – and it’s a tantalising idea. But it never really coheres into a satisfying whole. Probably what Amazon thought, too.
