Hunters review: Al Pacino gives subtle performance as Nazi-hunter

Amazon Prime’s new series starring Al Pacino takes its cues from the migration of Nazis to the US after World War II.

Hunters set out to bring Nazis to justice

Hunters has arrived on Amazon Prime, and much anticipated it is too, the new series produced by Oscar and Emmy winner Jordan Peele (Get Out, BlacKkKlansman), one of Hollywood’s busiest and most eclectic creatives. It’s a kind of manhunt drama echoing those stories that arose in the post-war period, finding the appropriate expression of grief and outrage, and reaching their apotheosis in 1970s movies like Marathon Man and The Boys From Brazil.

It was a time when there was a grave fear that real Nazis had somehow evaded justice, and a Fourth Reich genre evolved that provided a vicarious, posthumous fictional form of vengeance.

Set in 1977, Hunters references that genre’s persuasiveness and the theme that continues to haunt the popular imagination, described by film critic Stephen Hunter as the Nazi as Master Criminal, as Superman of Evil. “He was the first high-concept movie character,” writes Hunter in Violent Screen. “He didn’t have to be explained; his terrible iconography – the jackboots, the black tunic, the double flashes of the SS emblem, the twisted cross of his armband – identified him immediately and set up certain expectations.”

Hunters, created and written by David Weil (Moonfall), who has a nice feel for the rhythm and stylistic vernacular of classic film noir, takes this notion of the “theatrical Nazi” further into the world of superhero movies, his inspiration to some extent his memories as a child of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, relating stories of the Nazis. “I saw those stories as comic book stories, stories of grand good versus grand evil, and that became the lens through which I saw the Holocaust. It was a world of great good and great evil — a world of a lot of death and suffering and darkness, but a world where hope was possible if we took it upon ourselves to make it so.”

Another motivation for Weil was the true tales of Nazis who were able to move to the US after World War II, some actually living freely in New York, many brought in as spies to work for US intelligence against the Soviets during the Cold War. Other influences were the real-life Nazi pursuers looking for vengeance, imposing vigilante justice, as well as the nonviolent hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal, who was involved in actions against hundreds of Nazis.

A scene from Hunters

The series comes as the white supremacist movement in the US has retreated and regrouped following the Charlottesville march, when neo-Nazis chanted “You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us”, the ideal of a white homeland now we’re told being pursued politically through a tolerant administration. But there are still plenty out there, armed, dangerous and no doubt plotting.

It begins in Maryland with a wonderful theatrical set piece seemingly contained in one or two operatic camera movements when the US Secretary of State, Biff Simpson, played with malodorous creepiness by Dylan Baker, turns a convivial backyard cookout into a murderous shootout when he’s identified as a Nazi hiding in plain sight. Its preposterousness establishes a style straight from comic books and so-called 70s grindhouse cinema, another influence on Weil, with its aestheticisation of violence.

We’re soon introduced to Logan Lerman’s Jonah Heidelbaum, a comic book nerd desperate to find the killer of his Holocaust survivor grandmother Ruth, and the man who becomes his mentor, the aged survivor turned Nazi hunter Meyer Offerman. He’s played by Al Pacino, and it’s a quietly orchestrated performance, full of detail, as he subtly investigates mysteries of temperament and disposition.

They and their comrades begin to violently target Nazis, like Biff Simpson, who have worked their way into American politics to infiltrate the government, a quest Offerman explains involves not murder but “Mitzvah” – a commandment from God.

Hunters is directed with some stylistic flamboyance by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, his cameras in the hands of veteran cinematographer Frederick Elmes rarely still, and he hits perfect pitch at the story’s crucial turning points with his unusual angles and surprising moves. In this show structure is movement. Often the only coverage of scenes is a hurtling master shot that will rapidly shift from wide angle to close-up to a travelling sequence as the characters move away.

For all the tonal shifts, the juxtaposition of styles and the kinetic camera choreography, Weil is deadly serious in his ambition for this series for even as he entertains us drawing his primary energy from the theatricality of these Nazis, we are all too well aware of the way anti-Semitic crimes are rising around the world.

Wrongly Released: Free to Kill is a new original Foxtel crime investigation from the Crime + Investigation channel, and gripping and disturbing it is, too. Produced and directed by Brad Love for Title Role, it looks at the failings of the Victorian justice system a decade ago and the errors in principle of the sentencing practices, which resulted in violent criminals being re-released time and again on parole only to go on escalating their crimes in harming women and their families.

It follows two cases in which the objective seriousness of the offence or moral culpability of the offender was largely ignored by the courts at a time when, for reasons still a little unclear, they ignored all directions from government and sentences bore no relationship to statutory maximums laid down by parliament.

And Love’s production in its tight, well-structured fashion illuminates community views of punishment in his interviews with the victim’s family and their friends, the problems of ensuring safely and the dependability of the legal system itself.

And it dramatically demonstrates how, according to former SA Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Pallaras, parole “is a system with few friends, creates more problems than it solves and which ultimately pleases no one”.

The first episode deals with parolee William Watkins, a man hiding a violent past and a long rap sheet, an avuncular giant who could easily down 20 to 30 pots of beer in a night.

Chances were missed when he could have been incarcerated for 25 years in 2000 after an aggravated burglary and rape charge, but was instead sentenced in the Victorian County Court to four years and three months’ jail, with a non-parole period of two years. While on the streets and somehow offered his old job back, he stabbed 23-year-old Colleen Irwin and her sister, Laura, 21, to death in their Altona North home. Fatefully, Watkins lived in the same street across from their house.

It’s a chilling account and as often the case with the true-crime genre it is told with a claustrophobic intensity, the look, so much of it the result of the grainy TV footage from the time: cold, slick and haunting. Expertly engineered by Love and sensitively photographed by Oliver McGeary, the show presents, as the best of this genre does, a dense texture of contemporary historical detail, which gives these terrible stories a shocking specificity.

The interviews with their parents and close friends bring home the way murder is like a guillotine that falls across so many lives, between the before and the after.

For all these people so intimately involved with these murdered young women, their lives are stripped away and as family friend Candice Osborne suggests they are forced to attempt to make sense of the fact that they are survivors but their friends are not. How can that be?

It’s as if the court’s relationship with truth was fundamental but cracked. The parole system simply didn’t make sense to lawyers or people in the street but it was for some arcane reason followed with the kind of bizarre rectitude that with no triaging in place allowed rapists and murderers the same freedoms when released from jail as car thieves and serial shoplifters.

It was a time as Gavin Silbert, the former chief crown prosecutor, points out in the film when the court ignored all directions from the parliament, sentences having no relationship to the statutory maximums set down by government. It was only in 2017 in the so-called incest trial, the Dalgleish affair, that attempts were made to rectify what had been going on for a decade.

Watkins was a killer so spectacularly malevolent that it makes you wonder at the presence of an evil beyond comprehension, a man giving in to his instinctual drives, and who shaped his whole life in order to accommodate them. Yet he was given relatively light sentences and set free by an obdurate Victorian legal system while still plotting in service to the secret agenda of his needs.

The story reaches no happy conclusions either as while a sex offenders register has existed for some time in Victoria its contents are known only to police. And, while the recent federal budget may have awarded $80m to establish a public register, debate and negotiations drag on.

Hunters, streaming on Amazon Prime.
Wrongly Released: Free to Kill, streaming on Foxtel On Demand.

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