Hunters Fans Are Unimpressed With Season 2's Gun Fights
A show like Amazon's "Hunters" is tricky to pull off, tonally. On one hand, it deals with about the heaviest subjects imaginable: the Holocaust, survivor's guilt, and revenge. On the other hand, there's no denying that the show has a sense of humor about itself. It's full of over-the-top characters, like the gun-toting nun Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), or Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor), Jewish-American action star of fictional 1970s movies like "Eight Ways to Shabbat" and "Side Order of Vengeance." Most of the time, the mixture works. Currently, "Hunters" has a 70% Fresh rating among the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 66% Fresh rating among the fans. Definitely not universal critical acclaim, but well above the Rotten threshold, too. (For more on how "Hunters" balanced its differing tones, check out SlashFilm's interview with showrunner Nikki Toscano).
Still, no show can please everyone, even its most passionate fans. When "Hunters" returned for Season 2 in January 2023, fans were especially disappointed with the way the show handled gunfights. After Season 1's shocking twist involving Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), which we won't spoil here, the Hunters return for one last mission: hunting down Adolf Hitler (Udo Kier) and bringing him to justice. All of that involves plenty of gunplay, and here's why fans weren't impressed.
Fans thought Hunters' gun fights added nothing to Season 2
Overall, fans felt that the gun fights emphasized style over substance, while also relying too much on movie and TV tropes about gunfighting.
"The gunfights really broke my immersion personally," wrote Redditor DeltaJesus. In particular, they pointed to the scene where Sister Harriet, Roxy (Tiffany Boone) and Jonah (Logan Lerman) track Jonah's kidnapped girlfriend to the Nazis' hideout, where the Nazis are hiding in the basement. Then, the Nazis ambush them and they engage in a shootout between the floorboards. DigitalJesus disliked the scene, especially how the Hunters are shown firing dozens of bullets without ever needing to reload once.
"The gun action scenes are terrible," agreed Redditor Educational-Ear7540. "Just a bunch of sounds and fake light and no sense of endless bullets damaging anything. Everyone just fires off blindly with no sense of good editing or space." Educational-Ear7540 went on to complain that "The direction and action is terrible and hardly any variety, all gun deaths are same, same injuries, no effort in make- up or to creatively do anything with the action and violence, no cool deaths, generally bland."
So, pretty clear how that viewer felt.
Other fans had problems with the way the actors used their firearms. "The gun fights killed me," wrote Redditor WebbyAnCom. "Joe holding the AK-47 above his head during the bunker battle made me laugh out loud." DeltaJesus also pointed to Sister Harriet's choice to dual-wield her pistols, which is such an overused trope that it has its own TV Tropes page.
Overall, these are some of the most common gun cliches in movies and TV. While it might seem unfair to single out one show for relying on them, fans felt that "Hunters" just leaned on them too much.