Hunters review: The abrupt Nazi-killing in new Al Pacino series is pure Quentin Tarantino

‘Inglourious Basterds’ is an obvious reference point for new series from Jordan Peele of ‘Get Out’ fame

Hunters (Amazon Prime) opens with a scene of cartoonish violence that catches the viewer off-guard. The camera descends from above onto the garden of a large house in rural Maryland in 1977, where elderly patriarch Biff Simpson (Dylan Baker) is hosting a barbecue. He has a margarita and an apron that says “kiss the cook”. His children are playing in the pool, and the lawn is scattered with brightly coloured inflatables. Biff’s junior colleague Hirsch (Stephen Pilkington) arrives with his wife Helen (Izabella Miko) ready to talk shop. When Helen sees Biff’s face she freezes, drops her pie, and starts screaming that he is the “butcher”, a Nazi who killed her family. Biff pleads innocence at first, then calmly reaches under his grill for a pistol. He shoots his wife and three children, two other guests and Hirsch. Before he completes the massacre, he explains to Helen that she was right, he is a Nazi, one of many living in America, preparing to rise up and create a new reich.

The rest of the first episode takes place mainly in Brooklyn of the same year, where wide-eyed Jewish tearaway Jonah (Logan Lerman) watches his grandmother be murdered by an unknown assailant. At the wake he meets Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), who begins to induct him into a mysterious group of Nazi hunters, who are seeking revenge on their wartime assailants in the most direct and grizly ways they can imagine. Almost any means will suffice, when the aim is dead Nazis. Over the course of the first series, various German emigres are bumped off in a variety of grizzly ways. An old woman in Florida is gassed naked in the shower. A toyshop owner is stabbed in the eye. A Wagner-obsessed camp guard is played music until his ears bleed. The Nazi hunters are also being counter-hunted by the Nazi elements, especially a young psychopath called Travis (Greg Austin), while an FBI agent Morris (Jerrika Hinton) is on the tail of both groups.

The stylish direction, meticulous period detail, throwaway humour and abrupt mass-murder are pure Quentin Tarantino. His film about Nazi hunting, Inglourious Basterds, is an obvious reference for the Hunters writers and producers, led by Get Out’s Jordan Peele. By way of justification for the violence, flashbacks return us to the camp at Auschwitz, where we witness the terrors of the Holocaust. They are gruesome but curiously sanitised, too: we see the death and defiance but little of the aftermath. Everyone dies before we’ve grown attached.

The Hunters, too, are such thin caricatures that the rag-tag misfits in X-Men or Ocean’s 11 appear practically Dostoyevskian by comparison. Some serious wedge has been splurged. The street scenes ooze research and prop budgets. At the heart of it all is Pacino, coaxed into his first major TV appearance. He could do this stuff in his sleep, but he shows up nonetheless. His Meyer is a grizzled old millionaire, sustained by an simmering quiet fury. For him there is no question that the Nazis deserve direct revenge. It’s to the cast’s credit that they don’t labour too much in his shadow, especially Austin, previously known for roles in Mr Selfridge and the Doctor Who spin-off Class, as the villainous Travis.

With so much ground to cover, so many characters to introduce and so much Nazi blood to shed, the script barely has time to make us care about any of them, even with a 90-minute opening episode. A high percentage of the jokes are duds, and the Hunters have none of the heart and cool that made Tarantino’s Basterds oddly likeable. You might expect a series about such a provocative topic to divide audiences into love and hate, but the main obstacle to Hunters is indifference.