Note for local viewers: about 15 percent of Kraven the Hunter is in Russian, subtitled only in Czech in Prague cinemas.
A skilled assassin with the superpowers of, uh, jungle animals(?) causes himself all sorts of family issues while working through a hit list of poachers and drug kingpins in Kraven the Hunter, which premieres in Prague tonight and rolls out in cinemas worldwide this weekend. Despite some competent work both behind and in front of the camera, this sixth and possibly, hopefully, final entry in Sony’s Spider-Man(-Less) Universe is as bafflingly inane as previous duds Morbius and Madame Web.
Kraven the Hunter stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the titular character, who originated in the Marvel comic books as a big game hunter who sets his sights on the most dangerous game: Spider-Man. Because the movies in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe cannot contain Spider-Man due to complex rights issues, a screenplay credited to Richard Wenk (The Equalizer) and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (Iron Man) re-imagines Kraven into a John Wick-style superhero who, in the film’s opening scene, infiltrates a Siberian prison to take out a Russian crime lord.
Why is he brutally executing Russian crime lords? To know that you must learn the origin of Kraven, which the film painstakingly details in a 30-minute flashback after its slam-bang setup, which you can catch online before heading out to the cinema.
Kraven the Hunter is DOA in these early scenes, which might be the most confused superhero origin story to make it to the screen. After the death of his mother, a teenage Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller) and his young half-brother Dimitri (Billy Barratt in early scenes, and later Fred Hechinger) are whisked away to Africa by their crime boss father Nikolai (Russell Crowe, devouring a Russian accent with the same gusto he brought to Italy in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist) on a safari to hunt down a mythical killer lion.
Sergei is brutally attacked by the beast and carried away in its jaws, but gently placed down behind some bushes as a drop of the lion’s blood falls into one of his open wounds. Thankfully, a young Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) just happens to be strolling through the area, and pours into Sergei’s mouth a mystical potion her grandmother just happened to hand her earlier that day.
Enter: Kraven the Hunter, who because of the lion’s blood and/or magic potion (there’s a Tarot card that might have something to do with it too) now has vague animal-based superpowers like the vision of an eagle, the speed of a gazelle, the strength of an ox, and the tree-climbing prowess of…a squirrel? Most of these powers are showcased through sped-up footage of Taylor-Johnson jumping, climbing, and running through the forest with all the grace of Edward Cullen in Twilight.
Year later, Sergei has left big bad dad and little bro behind to live a Siberian hut and do good in the world, like hunt down the poachers that leave dozens of yak corpses in their wake. But one day he follows one of the poachers back to the big shots in London, and conveniently comes across a little black book that has all the names of the other big baddies out there.
But Kraven leaves a power vaccuum in the underworld of London’s Russian mafia after killing the guy in the first scene, and now, a full hour into this movie, a narrative starts to form. Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola, challenging Crowe in the scenery-chewing department), who can transform into the Hulk-like Rhino, not only kidnaps Kraven’s brother as he makes a move on his father’s territory, but also hires the time-manipulating Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) to track down Kraven himself.
Like Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter shows serious signs of post-production tampering, including poorly ADR’d dialogue throughout the entire movie; in those early Russian-speaking scenes, even Taylor-Johnson’s lips appear to have been digitally altered to match the overdub, which also sounds like an entirely different actor. A climactic fight scene set amid a yak stampede is nowhere near as effective as it should be, thanks to substandard digital effects work.
But the worst offender here is the screenplay: the narrative in Kraven the Hunter is a tiring mess of seemingly random events cobbled together in the form of a movie, but the soul isn’t there. None of these characters, including our protagonist, feel sufficiently motivated to do what the movie has them do, especially given the film’s climactic revelation. There are five major Spider-Man villains here in Kraven, Calypso, Rhino, Foreigner, and Chameleon, but without a Spider-Man around, none of them do anything remotely interesting.
Director J.C. Chandor had never made a bad film, following his Oscar-nominated features Margin Call and All is Lost with the first-rate crime dramas A Most Violent Year and Triple Frontier. There are echoes of his previous films here, in his framing of crime deals and lighting of stark London lairs, and when the effects work isn’t distracting us, Kraven the Hunter looks pretty great with sharp widescreen cinematography by Ben Davis (The Banshees of Inisherin) covering exotic locations across multiple continents.
But there’s no denying Kraven the Hunter is a bad film, one that’s doubly disappointing given the director’s pedigree. Unlike Morbius and Madame Web, there’s not much camp value to be had here, either: this one is deadly serious, and for much of its 2+ hour runtime, deadly dull. Any fans of the big game hunter supervillain from the Spider-Man comics will be disappointed by the tame animal lover in this film version, while anyone else watching this movie will be utterly perplexed at what they’re seeing on the screen.
