Hunters Season 2 Review: Trivial Reflection On The Forms Of Ideological Violence That Continue To Survive

Cast: Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvany, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Al Pacino, Udo Kier

Creator: David Weil

Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

One of the rules that a gambler should constantly follow is to leave the table when he is winning. This is essentially what the creators and producers of Hunters Season 2 should have done because let’s face it: the bet won with the first season was half a miracle. Proposing a difficult theme such as the Holocaust and the hunt for escaped Nazis after the end of the Second World War with such narrative audacity and pulp aesthetics had been a gamble that had been convinced mainly due to the novelty of the approach and the objective entertainment developed by characters and situations. Exactly what is completely missing in this second season.

In 2020 it had been one of the serial cases of American streaming, partly due to the productive presence of Jordan Peele and the acting presence of Al Pacino. Now he’s back, with the second and final season, always on Amazon Prime Video, and we talk about this in our Hunters Season 2 review.

Hunters Season 2 Review: The Story

Director Phil Abraham and the rest of the show’s creatives try to raise the bar by adopting two narrative strategies [SPOILER ALERT!]: using flashbacks to keep the mastermind character   Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) on stage and introducing the hunt for man directed towards the villain par excellence Adolf Hitler (Udo Kier). Well, neither of these two solutions is minimally effective, on the contrary, it is clear how much they were both designed to remedy the evident lack of ideas. As new episodes pass, it becomes as clear as Hunters Season 2 doesn’t have anything to say, nor is it able to offer insights into already known characters, proposing them in an empty if not downright stereotyped way.

And here then that even the actors show their limits when they find themselves having to interpret their respective roles: if Logan Lerman, Josh Radnor and all the other protagonists were all in all effective results working constantly over the top and painting “larger than life” figures, now show all their limits by failing to give substance to figures that in any case do not possess any of their own. Even if a legendary actor like Al Pacino fails this time in the task of convincing the viewer – and certainly the unfortunate twist that his character had suffered at the end of the first season does not help him –  it is difficult to speculate how the others could have excelled instead. Starting newcomer Jennifer Jason Leigh is closer to being constantly annoyed with her fictitious accent than vaguely believable. However, the climax is reached when the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun (Lena Olin) is staged, built on skits of daily disagreements and hypocrisies that do not even reach the thickness of the sketches between the late Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello.

Hunters Season 2 Review and Analysis

Almost the entire main cast from Season 1 returns: Hunters past and present are Logan Lerman (Jonah), Al Pacino (Meyer), Carol Kane (Mindy Markowitz), Jerrika Hinton (Millie Morris), Josh Radnor (Lonny Flash), Louis Ozawa (Joe Mizushima) and Kate Mulvany (Harriet), while on the other side of the fence is Lena Olin as Eva Braun and Greg Austin as Travis Leich, the American neo-Nazi indoctrinated by the Fourth Reich. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the newcomer in the role of Chava Apfelbaum, and as a special guest, in the role of Hitler, is the German star, Udo Kier. Another minor but important presence, already seen in the first season, is Judd Hirsch in the part of Simon Wiesenthal, the most famous Nazi hunter in the world.

The first season of Hunters was wacky fun, torn between wanting to be purely excessive and sometimes in bad taste, complete with fake trailers that sometimes served as interludes or introductions, and a more serious reflection on the survival of evil in its cruelest form in recent times, and on history that risks repeating itself. A somewhat bizarre formula, which remained standing until the end, with an ending that on the one hand, made Meyer Offerman leave the scene with a non-trivial speech on the ambiguity of the human soul and then took his leave of the audience with the apotheosis of trash which was the revelation linked to Hitler (at the time without an interpreter and therefore framed so that only the famous mustache, now graying, was visible). Therefore, there was no lack of doubts about how the series could fix the shot in the coming seasons.

And here, somewhat surprisingly, the creator David Weil managed to build something more coherent, mainly through the flashbacks that deepen the figure of Zuchs, reduced to a bit of a speck in the first season at the time of the twist, and the introduction of characters who question the attitude of Jonah and company. The explicit violence is still there, sometimes even with surreal touches, but with a background of melancholy and despair instead of the mostly goliardic tone of the first year, and even the most stereotyped characters arrive on the screen with a certain depth, at the order to feed the reflection on the forms with which Hitler’s ideology has survived up to the present day (net of the somewhat petty rhetorical mechanism.

Hunters Season 2 Review: The Last Words

Up to a penultimate episode that manages to create a poignant story using completely new figures, practically a long interval waiting for the finale. The kind of audacity that the first season boasted without really possessing it, and which now allows Jonah and company to say goodbye with style, intelligence, and courage. The second season of Hunters is more coherent and considered than the first, with a non-trivial reflection on the forms of ideological violence that continue to survive.