Kraven the Hunter Review: Fearsome Marvel heavy gets house-broken
Sony tames Spider-Man’s most charismatic villain.
Not that it's a contest or anything, but Kraven the Hunter is easily the blandest and most compromised of Sony Pictures' Spider-Man adjacent movies. It's wary of its subject, more haphazardly chopped together than Morbius, and less coherent than Madame Web, which at least had the decency to be strange as well as stupid. (Kraven isn't nearly as respectable, for reasons we'll get into shortly.) On a happier note, this is expected to be the last of Sony's cynical sub-Marvel business ventures for a while. If that's the case, I can't think of anything more fitting to cap off such an odious era than this tedious misfire from director J.C. Chandor, who has yet to make a great movie but has, at least, made better movies than Kraven the Hunter.
My initial nervousness about Kraven's prospects took a dire turn after an early and interminably long flashback sequence concerning the origin of Kraven, aka Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). In this flashback, we see him hunt a lion with his Russian oligarch father (Russell Crowe) while grappling with the sudden death of his mother. "She was weak," Crowe tells him and his brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who Spider-Fans know grows up to be the Chameleon. Dad is referring to her suicide after years of suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness.
It's important to highlight this plot point because it's the only significant nod to J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck's "Kraven's Last Hunt," which memorably explored the villain's deteriorating mental state during his final battle with Spider-Man. It was bold stuff for a superhero comic when it was first published (in 1987) and arguably one of the few Kraven stories worth adapting. So, for a moment, I hoped the film might travel down a similarly compelling route, but it soon became clear Kraven wouldn't bother with anything so disturbing or interesting as that. I'm sure Sony's initial plan was to build a franchise around Taylor-Johnson; naturally, he plays it safe, another glowering super-stud with more abs than depth, stuck in a movie uninterested in showing us anything messier than the odd splash of digital blood.
On the action front, Kraven is beset by two super-powered baddies. One is the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), who can mentally freeze his prey before shooting them with a gun (he must have been late when they were handing out powers), and the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), a squirrely criminal freakazoid who obligingly turns into a rock-monster just as the finale arrives. (At least he was gracious enough to ham up his weirdo Russian accent beforehand, one part Ivan Drago, one part Christopher Walken.) It's hard to say how Taylor-Johnson acquits himself in the film's few traditional fight sequences, as the bits where he's battling Rhino's army of non-powered goons are edited like mayhem and appear to have been choreographed on a moment's notice. He saunters into every scene like a bruiser, but Taylor-Johnson is the least intimidating guy in Kraven. (It is cute how he deepens his voice whenever he's onscreen with Crowe, though.)
Despite its title, Kraven the Hunter doesn't boast the first live-action version of the formidable Spider-Man villain but a domesticated knock-off. There are aspects that the two iterations share, like heightened senses, enhanced strength, and agility, which allows the lead to scale walls like a nipped-up tomcat and sprint like Tom Cruise spliced with a cheetah. (Kraven gets his powers from a mixture of lion blood and an elixir given to him by Calypso, played by Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose, who deserves better than this.) Perfunctory character origin beats aside, the resemblances stop there.
One last thing that bugs me is the movie's tagline: "Villains aren't born. They're made." It writes a check Kraven can't cash. There's nothing particularly villainous about him in this movie, nor is there anything in his arc suggesting he may take an unsavory turn one day. The film's ASPCA-friendly anti-poaching stance (a predictable if odd choice for a movie about a big game hunter) tames Kraven in a way that also meekens his image: an origin is set up for his infamous lions-head vest only for the movie to ultimately chicken out on delivering it in all its vulgar glory. (This Kraven clearly prefers pleather.) As Sony calculatedly distances Kraven from Spider-Man, it similarly removes the character from his more notorious aspects — defanged, declawed, no roar, no bite.
1 / 10
Kraven the Hunter is in wide release now.
Directed by J.C. Chandor.
Screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway.
Cinematography by Ben Davis.
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, and Russell Crowe.
Produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and David Householter.
Rated R for salty language and some unconvincing digital gore effects.