If the rumors are true (and maybe they aren’t even rumors at this point) and Sony is truly done making these nonsense, periphery Spider-Man-universe films (minus actual appearances from Spider-Man), they are going out on one of the more entertaining works to date—and it’s still pretty trashy.
After three Venom movies, Morbius, and the atrocious Madame Web, we now get Kraven the Hunter, a title I was genuinely looking forward to because A) it was expected to lean into more violent, R-rated material, and B) it’s directed by J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year), a talented filmmaker with an ear for dialogue and a gift with actors. Unfortunately, he didn’t write this film, which immediately works against the filmmaker despite working with a terrific group of actors who are ultimately forced to recite exposition-heavy nonsense.
Getting into the geeky weeds for a second, Kraven the Hunter features no fewer than five Spider-Man villains (and mentions a sixth by name), and much like the more popular Venom movies, Sony is attempting to reimagine some of these characters as antiheroes, rather than flat-out bad guys. Kraven (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a murderer, sure, but only of people who deserve to die. He grew up with a tyrannical father (Russell Crowe) who taught his two sons that being a man means you had to be ruthless and sometimes kill to make your point to both the animal kingdom and among humans. Kraven (real name Sergei Kravinoff) was nearly killed by a lion as a teenager while on a hunt with his father, but was saved by a mysterious young woman named Calypso, using a potion that gives Kraven powers that synch him up with the natural world, including animals. He runs away from his father and younger brother Dmitri in order to be alone in his late mother’s family estate, where he trains for many years before emerging as a killer for hire.
The grownup Kraven tries to keep in touch with his piano-playing brother (Fred Hechinger, Thelma, Gladiator II), but when a hit nearly goes sideways, Kraven realizes that someone is tracking him as well as his family. Seemingly by coincidence, Kraven manages to find the adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who is now a lawyer (and we know this because she literally says “I’m a lawyer”) but still dabbles in the mystic arts and has connections that lead Kraven to find the man who is after him, Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola). He's better known in criminal circles as the Rhino, for reasons that become obvious early on. He had a run-in with Kraven’s father years earlier and is seeking revenge for this disrespectful slight. Rhino’s “condition” is the result of a doctor named Miles Warren, who is only mentioned once, but comic book fans know Warren becomes the Jackal, and thus Kraven the Hunter has stacked these familiar villain names in front of us like some sort of grand tease, with absolutely no payoff (for those keeping score, Dmitri eventually becomes a shape-shifting villain named The Chameleon).
The problem with Kraven the Hunter is that it’s a lot of spinning plates, all of which add up to nothing much. Some of the performances are actually pretty strong, but even those are hard to spot because the screenplay is so sloppy. The one exception to this comes later in film when Christopher Abbott shows up as a Rhino-hired assassin known as the Foreigner (a baddie from the comics so obscure, even I wasn’t aware of him), whose power seems to be making his opponent think he can move fast by causing them to blackout for a few seconds. Whatever. Abbott is a scream in this role, and when he fully enters the film, things actually seem fun for long stretches of time. There are also a couple of really well-staged action sequences, and the film on the whole looks great, partly because of some wonderfully dreary yet picturesque locations.
I also like that Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven as arrogant but fully accurate about how capable he is as a hunter. No one can hide from him or beat him in combat, and he’s happy to let you know that whether you ask him about it or not. It’s a comic-accurate take on the character, and Taylor-Johnson nails it. But so much of this film is talk, endless talk about what has just happened and what is about to happen, and then when we actually see it play out, it's more or less how it was explained. We get backstory on top of backstory, and most of it amounts to nothing but cliche gangster plot and dialogue. And as promised, the action sequences are often quite bloody (using a bear trap as a weapon to chomp someone’s head off is so satisfying. No notes on that).
This was Sony’s last chance to get it right, and they got it closer than they ever have outside of the Spider-Man films, which technically they didn’t even make (thank you, Marvel Studios). But the plot holes and under-developed characters still plague these movies, and until they figure out how to do the Spider-Man universe right, stopping these embarrassing movies is the best call.
The film is now in theaters.
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