REVIEW: ‘Hunters’ Season 2 is a Lackluster Series Finale

After almost 3 years, the waiting is finally over as Hunters Season 2 returns to Prime Video. Executive produced by Jordan Peele, Hunters details the lives of a collective of ordinary Jewish people hunting down Nazis post world war II. Led by Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) this unlikely cast of characters has fallen on hard times and gone their separate ways. But when news emerges that Adolf Hitler is in fact alive, the hunters reunite for one last mission.

Written and created by David Weil, Hunters first season captured within its story a tale of vengeance, sorrow, and deceit. When Jonah is first recruited by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) during the funeral of his Safta (or Grandmother), he discovers that she led a secret life of nazi hunting—buoyed by the cause and seeking retribution for his family he is consumed by the idea of vengeance at all costs. He seeks out the ultimate war criminal who plagued his safta during her imprisonment in the concentration camps, a german man named Wilhelm Zuchs, a.k.a. ‘the Wolf’. Only to later discover that the man who he’s come to trust this entire time, the man guiding him, was the wolf all along. Meyer was Wilhelm. The final post-credit scene was even more explosive as one of the hunters, Joe (Louis Ozawa) was kidnapped and taken to Argentina and revealed in front of the worst of worst, Adolf Hitler.

Entering the second and final season of the series, two years have passed since the initial events of Meyers’s reveal as Wilhelm leading to his murder. The team is now dispersed around the world after a mission in Spain went horribly wrong forcing the Hunters to disband. Jonah is living a double life in Paris with his fiancé and continuing the work for his safta. After he stumbles onto the news that Hitler is alive from one of his marks, he understands now is the time to bring the group back together one last time and bring the architect of the holocaust and the war to justice.

While the second season should feel larger in scope, because compared to the first season it is, it also fails to establish the proper stakes, or back it up with enough flare to really make it sing. The first season did such a wonderful job of fusing the history of its members and atrocities seen during the war with the mystery and violence of its current timeline. There was a significant amount of intrigue in the detective work that went into discovering where these nazis were hiding, leading to the ultimate goal of finding the wolf in order to avenge Jonah’s safta.

Yet, two years on and everything feels a lot larger, and this narrative suddenly has an expiration date. I understand that the point is to wrap everything up for the final season, but it doesn’t really flow and the pace of how the story moves results in an experience that feels rushed in order to get from point A to point D. All of the subplots have that air of hasty finality as they try to neatly package it up and for me, it just ends up in the show losing that element of what made it special.

I think two other aspects that were found lacking from the series were the tonal focus that is placed on Hitler, and the effectiveness of the action sequences. Regarding the latter, the action was very poor. Throughout some of the later episodes, there are some big sequences were an armored standoff takes place and on paper, they feel incredibly creative and would look fantastic it adapted properly. Sadly, the end product fails to live up to the expectation and the use of the cinematography, and the weapons choreography comes across as repetitive and lazy. There were moments when those action sequences should involve a lot more suspense but instead it looks more like a playground interpretation of kids pretending to play cops of robbers as they stand two feet apart making a bang and pow noises arguing over who got who.

The former critique around the focus on Hitler is a more complex, and deeply personal topic that will likely cause division of opinion once the series airs. Ultimately my gripe with it is around the tone of finality, specifically making note of once Hitler is captured and brought to justice then it’s over and we won. Nazism has been defeated! Again, this is deeply personal for A LOT of people, and while this series is set in a fictional universe it’s based on actual events affecting a huge population of people. But it undercuts the point of the entire show for me which is what made season 1 such a success. Yes, Hitler being brought to justice would have been a historic moment, and while he led the party, and the hateful movement, it took many, MANY more people involved to carry out his wishes and the infliction of so much pain, and Season 2 just forgets that.

It has to be pointed out though, that Udo Kier who plays Adolf, actually does a superb job in the representation of the character and it’s extremely unsettling watching him bring this tyrant back to life.

Given the sole focus is on hunting for Hitler, there are a few episodes that tend to labor as the series lays the groundwork for the final conclusion. However the jarring jump from the season 1 post-credit scene to finally being in his backyard ultimately comes across as forced in order to close the books. So it’s a weird experience all in all.

Oddly enough the decision to bring back Pacino in the role of Offerman was a really great choice in the end as his story, and the explanation behind brings a much-needed reprieve from the main narrative as it’s just not strong enough to carry itself. It’s a far more interesting story, and Pacino always delivers in his performances.

Hunters Season 2 had a few good episodes but as a story that needed to be told, it’s not something we needed. It would have been easier to cancel this series than trying to wrap it up in the way they did. The final episode was a fascinating watch in a sense of “what if”, but it will absolutely cause division among viewers in the focus and the application of the story.

Hunters Season 2 will be available exclusively on Prime Video, Friday, January 13.