Hunters “In The Belly Of The Whale”

So, I saw the ads and promos for Amazon Prime’s new series Hunters.  Set in the 70s, it Al Pacino leading a group of Nazi hunters in America.  Now, something like that does have a potential for high pulp and craziness, but it could also be something about finding missing war criminals.  The trailers made it look like the latter, but hey, I might as well watch the show and find out what kind of show it is.

Having seen the first episode now, I can now say this is not a realistic sort of show involving looking for war criminals hiding in South America or something.  Even before the title card runs, we meet Biff Simpson, a Southern family man who works as a high ranking official for the Carter Administration.  He’s having some guests for a barbecue when a new co-worker comes by.  That man’s wife recognizes Simpson as, well, a Nazi she saw in the camps she survived as a kid and starts making accusations.  Now, if this were the relatively low-key sort of show where Simpson hides that until the title Hunters find him, then maybe kills the woman on the sly in a sneaky way later.

No, instead, Simpson pulls a silenced handgun out from under the barbecue and starts shooting…starting with his own wife and kids, then the other guests, and then switching to German to dish out some evil words to the woman who outed him and ruined his cover.

Yeah, this is the over the top sort of show, where a plumber will rig an old Jewish woman’s shower to gas her to death.

So, here we have a show where young Jonah Heidelbaum, something of a teenage geek.  He sells drugs to support himself and his elderly grandmother Ruth, a Holocaust survivor who doesn’t want to hear about what he needs to do so they can survive.

Well, someone shoots Ruth one night, Jonah seeing nothing but hearing everything, and while his own mathematical inclinations and sharp observation skills get him but so far, he needs his metaphorical fat pulled from the fire by another Holocaust survivor named Meyer Offerman.  That would be Al Pacino, with a thick Eastern European Jewish accent, having some fun as a guy who knows a few things and, well, has been hunting Nazis for quite some time with a team that has been keeping an eye on Jonah for quite some time.

Because the war is only really over for the dead.

Oh, and it looks like Meyer’s opposite number of a woman played by Lena Olin known only as “The Colonel”.  And she has some muscle we might as well call The Wolf.

So, this could be good.