Movie Review: ‘Kraven The Hunter’

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff / Kraven the Hunter in ‘Kraven the Hunter.’

Opening in theaters December 13th is ‘Kraven The Hunter,’ directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, and Russell Crowe.

Initial Thoughts

Aaron Taylor Johnson in Columbia Pictures and Marvel ‘Kraven the Hunter’. Photo: Sony Pictures.

Are we finally done with of the Sony Universe of Spider-Man Movies Not Featuring Spider-Man for good? We can only hope, because 2024 has surely brought us the nadir of this cash-grabbing MCU-adjacent nonsense with ‘Madame Web’ and now ‘Kraven The Hunter.’ Yet another pointless origin story for a Spider-Man villain that really serves no purpose without Spider-Man to fight against, ‘Kraven The Hunter’ wastes a serviceable performance from Aaron Taylor-Johnson (playing his second Marvel character in less than 10 years following his appearance as Quicksilver in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’) and smashes any hope of a real Kraven-Spidey face-off in the foreseeable future.

Like ‘Madame Web,’ ‘Morbius,’ and the ‘Venom’ movies, ‘Kraven The Hunter’ is dragged down by a laziness that infects every aspect of the production. A badly written script, lousy editing, miserable-looking CG, underwhelming acting, and even sloppy dialogue looping (yes, just like in ‘Madame Web’) hinder the film’s modest attributes, like Taylor-Johnson’s work and the occasional flash of electrifying violence. And it’s all directed by J.C. Chandor – who’s made some good movies, like ‘A Most Violent Year’ – with the energy of a weak wind blowing across a desolate Siberian plain (where much of the film takes place).

Story and Direction

‘Kraven the Hunter’ director J. C. Chandor.

‘Kraven The Hunter’ makes its points with such thudding heavy-handedness that the movie produces unintentional laughter almost from the start. Russian martial music blares over the opening scene to make sure we know we’re deep in the Russian countryside, as a transport brings the title character (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to a prison that would make Rikers Island look like the Four Seasons.

Kraven is there on purpose, however, to execute a Russian gangster operating within its walls, a plot point that will make more sense later as we first must endure an extended flashback from 16 years earlier. Here we meet the younger Kraven, real name Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller), who is pulled out of school along with his half-brother Dmitri by their brutish father Nikolai (Russell Crowe), who informs his sons that their mother has taken her own life because she was “weak.”

Dad decides that accompanying him on a hunt is just what the grieving boys need, although the rather timid Dmitri prefers singing and doing uncanny vocal impressions of Nikolai and others (he’s a “real chameleon,” as he and others tell us two or three times, just in case we don’t get the hint). Sergei is gravely injured by a legendary lion his dad has been tracking, and although he nearly succumbs to his wounds, a combination of the lion’s blood with a mystical potion given to him by a young African girl named Calypso — who just happens to be there with her parents — brings the young man back from the brink and imbues him with a range of special powers (enhanced strength and speed, better hearing, and eyes that change color).

Also bestowed somehow with a new moral code by that heady brew, Sergei decides he’s not going to join his father’s business and takes off for the Siberian wilderness, where he sets up house in a dome-like cabin left behind by his mother and protects the local animals from poachers. Now grown into the impressive shape of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven hunts bad guys as a sort of mercenary but is soon called back to help defend his estranged father, who’s being threatened by a man he once dismissed named Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), whose bizarre skin condition and own monstrous powers have led him to be called the Rhino.

Aaron Taylor Johnson in Columbia Pictures and Marvel ‘Kraven the Hunter’. Photo: Sony Pictures.

“A man who kills a legend becomes a legend himself,” gravely intones Nikolai at one point, as ‘Kraven’ deploys all the usual cliches about fathers and sons and the definition of “real” masculinity. Perhaps J.C. Chandor envisions this all as some sort of operatic Russian crime epic, but he’s undercut every step of the way by a ludicrous, coincidence-filled script from Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (the latter two are credited on the first ‘Iron Man’ for Marvel Studios). Kraven/Sergei steps out of his brother’s apartment for a nap just as a bunch of the Rhino’s thugs come to kidnap him; Kraven calls a now-grown Calypso (Ariana DeBose) to warn her that the Rhino is coming for her just as she happens to look outside her office and see those same thugs bursting in. Plot points are simply stacked atop each other without any real development just to clumsily get people from point A to point B.

Speaking of Calypso, who works as a lawyer, why does Kraven need her help in tracing bad guys if he’s supposedly the world’s greatest hunter? Why does her one notable fighting skill happen to come in handy just when Kraven needs it most? Does she even need to be in the story? And why the hell is the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), an assassin who can hypnotize people by staring at them and counting to three, necessary here when the plot is already weighed down with multiple villains?

In the end, these questions don’t matter because the rest of the film is so haphazardly done. For starters, there’s a CG lion that looks like it was discarded on a zip drive by someone at Disney and found by somebody else working on ‘Kraven.’ In fact, all the animals look terribly fake, a common problem in CG that’s exacerbated here by the sheer amount of them. And let’s not get started on the final version of the Rhino, who looks like the VFX folks just digitally stuck a horn and some rough gray skin over the superstructure of Rhys Ifans’ Lizard and called it a day.

We can harp on the film’s other problems – shockingly sloppy dialogue looping (especially when Chameleon, I mean Dmitri, sings in different voices), shockingly dumb dialogue, and unshockingly predictable plot turns like Sergei getting his powers from magic blood, an idea that goes back to the Andrew Garfield era of Spider-Man. But all these other issues pale next to the movie’s main drawback: it’s just dull. Chandor can’t wring anything resembling real energy out of these tired old tropes, and the movie just grinds along for better than two hours like a broken-down train groaning into its final station.

The Cast

(L to R) Aaron Taylor Johnson and Russell Crowe in Columbia Pictures and Marvel ‘Kraven the Hunter’. Photo: Sony Pictures.

If there is a saving grace to ‘Kraven The Hunter,’ it’s the title character himself. Aaron Taylor-Johnson does a very commendable job against the odds; even though this is a far cry from the Kraven of the comics in many ways, he does have a moral code, a sense of honor, and a thread of compassion that’s in conflict with his naturally violent tendencies. Taylor-Johnson is also quite physically suited for the role, even if the editing of the fight scenes leaves something to be desired (maybe he just said the hell with it and figured he’d use this for his James Bond audition tape). Kraven’s ultimate objectives are vague and kind of muddled, but that’s the script’s fault.

Fred Hechinger (seen this fall as the mad emperor Caracalla in ‘Gladiator II’ and the sadistic Harper in ‘Nickel Boys’) also does a decent job as Dmitri, although his eventual transformation into the Chameleon at the end is rushed and jarringly handled. One great shame about this movie is that it wastes three classic members of Spidey’s rogues gallery – Rhino, Chameleon (the very first villain Spider-Man ever faced!), and Kraven himself – on a movie that does these illustrious villains little justice.

The rest of the cast doesn’t fare very well. Alessandro Nivola ingests the scenery as the Rhino, camping it up and all but twirling his moustache, while Russell Crowe alternates between phoning it in and chewing the sets around him as well, his heavy Russian accent like something out of a Cold War movie. As for Ariana DeBose, there’s no nice way to say it: she’s just bad here, spouting every line in flatly declarative fashion as if she’s reading them for the first time. She seems lost at sea, but again, that may be a function of the script, which offers no real function for Calypso.

Final Thoughts

Aaron Taylor Johnson in Columbia Pictures and Marvel ‘Kraven the Hunter’. Photo: Sony Pictures.

The sad part about ‘Kraven The Hunter’ is that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s fur-clad killer might have made a formidable nemesis for the current Tom Holland iteration of Spider-Man (in fact, Kraven was allegedly the back-up plan for ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ if the multiversal thing didn’t work out). But this laughable movie all but ensures that this version of Kraven won’t cross over into Spidey’s corner of the MCU, despite the handful of painfully obvious Easter eggs scattered throughout the film.

As we noted above, we can only hope that the seven-year excursion into mediocrity that was the Sony Spider-Man Universe Not Featuring Spider-Man, which began in 2018 with ‘Venom,’ ends here with Kraven’s first and last hunt. The whole idea – to create a universe of movies starring Spider-Man villains without having Spider-Man show up in them – was a misfire from the beginning, the brainchild of two producers (Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach) desperate to hang onto whatever piece of the Marvel pie they could. Nearly half a billion dollars in production costs and six films later, their slice of that pie is moldy and spoiled and needs to go into the trash.

‘Kraven The Hunter’ receives 2.5 out of 10 stars.

“Villains aren’t born. They’re made.”

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R2 hr 7 minDec 13th, 2024

Showtimes & Tickets

Kraven the Hunter is the visceral, action-packed origin story of how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven,… Read the Plot

What is the plot of ‘Kraven The Hunter’?

The son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) of a Russian crime lord (Russell Crowe) rejects his father’s empire and sets out to track down criminals on his own and enact justice upon them, using his enhanced powers to make himself a feared and powerful hunter of men.

Who is in the cast of ‘Kraven The Hunter’?

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff / Kraven

Ariana DeBose as Calypso Ezili

Fred Hechinger as Dmitri Smerdyakov / The Chameleon

Alessandro Nivola as Aleksei Sytsevich / Rhino

Christopher Abbott as the Foreigner

Russell Crowe as Nikolai Kravinoff

‘Kraven the Hunter’ opens in theaters in October.

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