Watching Kraven the Hunter, I felt something I don’t usually feel in the movie theater. I felt guilt. “Guilt” for the laundry list of incredible, award-winning actors who signed up for this film, many of whom are rather good in it. Sure, they got paid, but that the likes of Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Ariana DeBose; fantastic character actors such as Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, and Christopher Abbott; and dashing leading man Aaron Taylor-Johnson were forced to act out the script being presented is criminal. It’s a script filled with action and plot points haphazardly pieced together with so many coincidences and awkwardly forced-in explanations, it becomes comical. I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling that way either, because by the end of the screening, most members of the audience were laughing and ironically cheering.
Directed by J.C. Chandor, Kraven the Hunter is the latest (and maybe last?) Spider-Man adjacent film from Sony. In Marvel Comics, Kraven is a skilled, evil hunter who travels the globe searching for the biggest and baddest prey imaginable. He’s a villain with a code, and supernatural aids to give him enhanced strength and speed. Here Kraven (Johnson) is only partially that. He’s a full-time superpowered assassin who jet-sets around, killing villains like a murderous jungle Batman. Things start there with an admittedly fun and surprising cold open (which you can conveniently watch right here if you’d like) before getting completely derailed by 30 minutes of boring origin story.
In flashback, we meet Kraven’s—real name Sergei Kravinoff—dad Nikolai (Crowe) as well as his younger brother, Dimitri. Through a long, drawn-out sequence we get a sense of their borderline abusive family dynamic, the family’s history with big game hunting, and then meet a seemingly random young girl named Calypso. Calypso is given a very special potion she’s told should only be used in the most dire of circumstances, who then proceeds to give it to Sergei about seven seconds later. The potion saves his life, gives him powers, and changes his outlook on everything, which sets him on the path to being Kraven. The whole thing is obvious, long, and dumb. But thankfully, we do eventually get back to the present day.
Now the aforementioned actors are playing grown-up versions of those characters, at which point Kraven conveniently finds a list of bad guys he can start to pick off. At this juncture, you may still be holding out hope for this movie but the hope quickly fades. That mainly happens when Kraven, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest hunter, admits it took him almost 20 years to find Calypso (DeBose), who he wants to team up with because she’s an investigative lawyer who also finds people. Wait, we thought he was a hunter? Why does he need her? And why did it take so long to find her? No real explanations are given.
Through several of those dumb connections, Kraven himself becomes the prey of the Rhino (Nivola), a character we briefly and confusingly met in the flashback who now can turn into a rhino. (This, mercifully, does have an explanation.) Rhino wants to take over the underworld and sees Kraven as his biggest threat. So, he hires the Foreigner (Abbott), another superhero, who goes on the hunt.
Things move on from there. Dimitiri (Hechinger) becomes a big part of it and there’s lots of jumping and killing and whatnot. This all sounds pretty bad, and it is, but what saves Kraven from being among the worst of the Spider-Man Universe movies is that cast. Aaron Taylor-Johnson doesn’t have a lot to work with here, but he’s suitably charismatic and menacing. He’s certainly too heroic to be the Kraven of Marvel Comics, at least at this point in his journey, but he’s very fun to watch. Abbott, Hechinger, and Nivola are then even a notch above because they seem to understand the movie they’re in more clearly than Taylor-Johnson and all really ham it up. Crowe is classic Russell Crowe—cool, scary, not trying too hard—and then there’s DeBose. Most of the guilt I was talking about earlier is directed toward her. Calypso is a complete afterthought in the movie, with some of the worst dialogue, plot devices, and more. DeBose does what she can but even she can’t save the awful writing.
The cast is one thing that helps Kraven be at least watchable, and another is all the Spider-Man references in the movie. You’d think, after Morbius, Madame Web, and three Venom movies there would be some kind of clear path set up for the central character in this universe, but oddly it’s not until Kraven that we can begin to see that path. That also might be because whenever there’s a mention of spiders, New York or the Daily Bugle, it’s like a bright light in a dark room. You have to adjust because something noteworthy just happened. That’s not the norm for Kraven, which for the most part is rather repetitive. A few of the action scenes are okay, others with big giant CGI animals are less so. And then, as previously stated, all of it is just stuck together with spit and bubble gum. Things just kind of randomly work out to move the story forward in ways that are increasingly embarrassing and annoying.
Even with all that said though, one of the biggest misses in the film is that almost everything interesting about the comic character of Kraven is all but missing in the film. This version of the character is basically just an action star, so he rarely has respect or adoration for his prey, and thinks about the consequences of his actions even less. The fact that such rich, meaty subtext is only sprinkled in haphazardly is beyond maddening. If you aren’t going to tackle what makes the character of Kraven cool and memorable in the first place, why do it at all?
The best things I can say about Kraven the Hunter are that it’s better than Madame Web and probably slightly better than Morbius. It also, by the end, gets to a point where the surviving characters actually have something interesting to work with, teeing up a follow-up we may never see. Which is the saddest part. By the end of Kraven, I was finally cravin’ more Kraven, but only cause Kraven’s ending is the only actually good or interesting thing about it.
Kraven the Hunter opens Friday.
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