It's no accident that the main character of Nazi-hunting thriller Hunters is a comic-book fan. When Amazon's latest series opens, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) is a 19-year-old living in New York City in 1977, working in a comic book store and debating Star Wars with his best friends (one of whom is nicknamed "Bootyhole"). He could be the protagonist of a low-brow teen sex comedy, but instead he's on his way to becoming a literal superhero in creator David Weil's pulpy take on vengeance and Jewish identity. When Jonah meets Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), a rich Jewish businessman and Holocaust survivor, he immediately tags Meyer as Bruce Wayne -- which makes Jonah into Dick Grayson, the Robin to Meyer's Batman.

The entire first episode of Hunters serves as an extended superhero-style origin story. Like so many of his comic-book heroes -- Jonah later name-checks Frank Castle and Peter Parker in addition to Bruce Wayne -- Jonah loses his only parental figure to a violent incident when his seemingly sweet, Holocaust-surviving grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin) is murdered by a mysterious gunman as Jonah watches on in horror. Meyer comes to his rescue and helps him channel his rage and his abilities a genius-level code-breaker and puzzle-solver into fighting against evil.

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As Meyer reveals to Jonah at the end of the opening episode, he's the head of a sort of Jewish Avengers, a group of people, each with their own special skills -- some with costumes and code names -- who work to locate Nazis living secretly in the United States and take them out. Meyer (whom Jonah later labels as Professor X) is the mastermind, and Jonah is the newcomer hoping to survive the experience.

The rest of the members get their own TV series-style intros in the second episode: Washed-up actor Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor) is the master of disguise. Former MI-6 agent Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvaney) handles logistics and is also a nun. Married couple Murray (Saul Rubinek) and Minnie (Carol Kane) are fellow Holocaust survivors and tech experts. Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boone) and Joe Torrance (Louis Ozawa) are the muscle.

The show leans into the comic-book and exploitation-movie influences, peppering the episodes with meta touches like those character intros, a movie trailer advertising the team's mission, and a public service announcement about how to spot Nazis. A TV Guide with Farrah Fawcett on the cover shows up a few times, and the Hunters could be a Jewish version of a contemporary TV crime-fighting team like Charlie's Angels or The Mod Squad or The A-Team. The pulpy tone comes and goes, though, alternating with a much more somber approach, especially in flashbacks to the Holocaust itself that fill out elements of the back story between Meyer and Ruth, or illustrate the atrocities committed by the Nazis that the Hunters are tracking.

Balancing the depiction of such horrifying real injustice (although specific events are fictionalized) with an exaggerated, almost cartoony take on violence is not easy to pull off, and Hunters mostly fails to make the tonal mix coherent. The show clearly owes a lot to Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but Tarantino kept his stylized version of history consistent and immersive, while Hunters frequently pokes holes in its own heightened reality, giving Jonah sober reflections on the cost of revenge, in addition to the desaturated Holocaust flashbacks.

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Jonah's anger and angst are the least interesting things about the show, but he gets the most screen time of any character, and his dour unpleasantness frequently halts the already sluggish plot momentum. In addition to the Hunters and the Nazis, the show also follows FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton), an earnest investigator looking into a string of mysterious deaths that she believes are evidence of secret Nazis being targeted for elimination. Millie's story is more of a straightforward police procedural, and she's always several steps behind the Hunters, the Nazis and the audience. In the five episodes available for review, she's just starting to make her way into the central plot.

Aside from Jonah, though, she's the most fully developed character, and Hinton's performance makes Millie into a more appealing potential protagonist than the abrasive Jonah. The smart move would be for the show to bring her on board with the team in some way, rather than positioning her as a morally superior antagonist. The show's main Nazis are so purely, flamboyantly evil that it's hard to buy into the moral ambiguity that Weil is trying to create.

Those Nazi villains include Dylan Baker as a fully integrated U.S. government official, complete with Southern accent and folksy mannerisms, who opens the first episode by carrying out a brutal massacre; Lena Olin as a mastermind known only as the Colonel; and Greg Austin as a young American-born neo-Nazi whose detached attitude toward violence is legitimately chilling. The show takes a turn toward alternate history -- with shades of fellow Amazon drama The Man in the High Castle -- with its depiction of a massive, highly coordinated and seemingly successful network of Nazi operatives hidden in the U.S., giving the Hunters adversaries worthy of a true superhero team. But it also downplays the existential threat of Nazism as an ideology, since every Nazi character is so clearly a single-minded megalomaniac.

Hunters doesn't need to emphasize social commentary to be entertaining or effective, but the main problem with the show is that it doesn't seem to know what it's aiming for. The bloated episodes all run at least 60 minutes, with the pilot clocking in at a patience-testing 90 minutes. Weil and co-showrunner Nikki Toscano throw in far too many ideas for the show to effectively handle, and the show collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.

Starring Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvaney, Dylan Baker and Al Pacino, the 10-episode first season of Hunters arrives Friday on Amazon.

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