After two years of delays, Kraven the Hunter has finally pounced into theatres. And it was not worth the wait. This is a bloated, convoluted, and – above all – dull conclusion to Sony’s attempts to make a series of films from the lesser Spider-Man villains. This is not really a film, but a corporate IP memo that escaped containment and made it into theatres. There is a director credited (J.C. Chandor), but the real direction comes from the Sony executive suite that wanted an MCU of their own. Every line, scene, and plot turn feels like the result of a notes session.
Now, after the likes of Madame Web and Morbius, I didn’t have any expectation that this would be good. I had my fingers crossed that it might be entertaining. Tom Hardy has managed to elevate the Venom movies into the realm of camp with his inspired and lunatic performance, so maybe? Alas, no. And apologies to all the women who I heard squealing at the sight of shirtless Aaron Taylor Johnson when the trailer came on in the theatres last summer, but he barely breaks out his abs in the movie. This damn thing can’t even meme itself right.
This is all you get.
The movie is all over the place and feels like it was rewritten a dozen times. It opens with Kraven breaking into a high-security prison in Siberia in order to kill a gangster. And it’s a pretty cool sequence! But it is immediately followed by what feels like a half-hour flashback to show how Kraven got his powers. And, hoo boy, it is a mess.
The beauty of the best superhero origin stories is their economy. Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered in front of him and vowed to stop criminals. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider. The X-Men were Born This Way and are feared and hated as a result. Simple. Direct.
Kraven? Well, the teenage Sergei Kravinoff was forced by his overbearing gangster of a father to go on a hunting trip after the death of his mother and was mauled by a legendary lion. Sergei was trying to connect with the beast when his Dad shot at it and scared it. After dragging him off, Sergei is saved when a teenage girl (Calypso) just happens to wander across his body. She was conveniently given a magical potion by her grandmother just minutes before that will “heal someone so they were better than before” and she will know who to give it to when she sees them. So she gives him a magic elixir and combined it with some of the blood of the lion. It revives him and gives him incredibly bad-defined powers. He can scramble up the sides of buildings and run on all fours like a big cat, he can talk to animals, and his senses are heightened to the point where he can smell the brand of cigarette a goon smoked on the street while he’s 300 feet up on top of a building.
I hope you took notes because that is a whole lot of nonsense. And it has very little to do with the Kraven the Hunter in the comics. (You’re shocked, I know.) That Kraven was a master game hunter who was strong and agile (but not super-powered) and was obsessed with catching Spider-Man. He’d hunted every animal, and Spider-Man would be his ultimate prize.
Now, due to the rather complicated licensing agreements Sony and Disney have worked out, Spider-Man cannot appear in these Sony-Villainverse movies. The only hint we get of Spider-Man is a ludicrous sequence in which Kraven has to face his fears due to a neurotoxin and it shows he’s afraid of spiders. (Really? You wrestle with tigers and lions and you’re scared of spiders?) And also because having a hero who is technically a poacher would probably not be popular with modern audiences, Kraven doesn’t hunt animals. No, he hunts “the most dangerous game,” criminals! This has the result of taking a villain and not turning him into an anti-hero, but rather a straight-up hero. What is “anti” about this? He protects animals! He kills criminals! So any friction between his villain status and his motivations here is gone.
The actors are left to flounder about, trying to find something in the ludicrous script to hang onto, with varying degrees of success. Russell Crowe, as Sergei’s dad, Nikolai, is having the most fun with his SNL-level Russian accent and embracing the toxic masculinity of the character, talking about how WE are predators and THEY are the prey.
Ariana DeBose should really be getting better parts after winning an Oscar. She is utterly wasted here as Calypso, the adult version of the girl who gave Kraven his potion. There are various other D-level villains here that feel like they only got in when Sony had an intern Google “Spider-Man villains who haven’t been in a movie yet.” (Answer: The Foreigner.) Alessandro Nivola plays the Rhino, here a disaffected rival gangster who has a condition that gives him indestructible skin. In an effort to consolidate the gangs, he kidnaps Kraven’s little brother, Dmitri, which kicks off what passes for a plot here.
It all feels so generic and rote, with not a single memorable line or scene. Like Morbius, it really feels like they pulled this out of a time capsule from the late ’90s or early ’00s, back before they knew how to make a decent superhero movie. Everyone likes to moan about the Marvel Style, but at least they make consistently decent movies! Not Sony! The camera work is uninspired. The action is meh. The effects are atrocious. The CGI animals are terrible, and less believable than the talking critters in the Mufasa trailer. They’d have been better off with actors in catsuits.
Press photo for Kraven 2: The Kravening
It’s not worth the curiosity factor. It’s not even an enjoyably crazy train wreck like Madame Web. Kraven is just bad and boring and it’s over two hours long. Completely not worth your time.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
