‘Kraven the Hunter’ Is Its Own Self-Inflicted Killshot
A PSA for folks who don’t have 60-plus years of Spider-Man comic-book history at their immediate beck and call: Kraven the Hunter was one of the webslinger’s earliest supervillains, having made his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #15. Created by Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, he’s a big-game hunter with a strong claim to being the greatest in the world; the bragging rights of bagging Spider-Man as a trophy, which would have secured him the title, was what fueled his quest to kill the superhero. Kraven even joined up with a bunch of his fellow Spidey-haters as part of the collective known as “the Sinister Six” in an effort to squash him, but still, no dice. Turn-ons included animal prints, furry collars, and the sort of mustaches favored by old-timey Russian czars. Turn-offs were poachers, anyone who foolishly believed they were superior to him, and being defeated by Spider-Man. If you’ve never read “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” his 1987 swan song that played out across three Spidey titles, we urge you to do so immediately. It’s reputation as one of the greatest comic storylines ever is well-earned.
Since he’s part of the top-tier canon of O.G. Spider-Man bad guys, it was a no-brainer that the character would show up in the movies eventually. The question was merely on which side of the MCU/Sony’s Spider-Man Universe fence he’d appear, thanks to the corporate-backscratching deal that allowed Tom Holland to swing between both worlds. Since the Venom movies had done so well for Sony, and Kraven had occasionally been portrayed as an antihero, the man in the leopard-skin pants earned his own R-rated solo joint in the SSMU. The hope was that, like Venom, this charismatic killer could anchor a franchise before potentially mixing it up with Holland’s friendly neighborhood do-gooder, or Tom Hardy’s schizophrenic symbiote, or maybe [fingers crossed] the big leaguers in that lucrative cinematic universe a few shops over.
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Even the world’s greatest hunter will tell you there’s no such thing as a sure shot, of course, and no would accuse the character’s big-screen debut of being anything close to a bullseye. The good news first: Kraven the Hunter is nowhere near a miss as Morbius, Sony’s botched 2022 attempt to turn a slightly less iconic villain into a comic-movie star. The bad news: It’s also not as awful as this year’s Madame Web, the company’s nadir of Spidey-adjacent spin-offs that at least had the decency to be so wretched it could instantly be recycled as camp, and left a perfect self-sabotaging press tour in its wake. The worst news: This misbegotten project still doesn’t have much reason to exist, especially given it’s a stand-alone entry that, other than a quick shot of a headline from the Daily Bugle and a deep-cut namedrop (the real ones know), doesn’t make a single reference to the webslinger. What you’re left with is something that wants the brand-name recognition of being a Spider-Man project by proxy, but also wants to give you an overly violent, extremely gory vigilante movie that, despite featuring Kraven fighting a weak-tea CGI version of another well-known Marvel villain, has nothing to do with those films. Congratulations on failing twice, we guess?
Whether the attempt to have it both ways is by design or simply the result of unfavorable backroom deals is unknown, to be honest. And yet that might not even be the worst of Kraven the Hunter‘s problems. We’re introduced to Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s apex predator as he’s being sent to a Siberian prison, one notorious for housing lifers, psychopaths and apparently character actors willing to play creeps. It soon becomes apparent that Kraven is here to do a job, i.e. dispatch someone far more evil than he is, and once that’s taken care of, he manages to escape by crawling up walls, running around on his arms and legs like a jungle cat, and punching and leaping his way to freedom. Director J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost, Triple Frontier) knows how to concentrate on resourceful protagonists solving IRL puzzles and stage both crash-pow-bang set pieces, and were this opening sequence to be turned into a 15-minute short, everyone might have gone home grinning.
From here, we rewind to a flashback in which a young Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller) and his half-brother, Dimitri (Billy Barrett), are whisked form a posh prep school in upstate New York to Northern Ghana. They are set to join their alpha-male father Nikolai on a hunting trip; played by Russell Crowe, this fearsome he-man is hoping to bag a mythical lion and wrestle a thick Russian accent to a draw. (Let’s just say: One out of two ain’t bad.) It’s Sergei who meets the beast first, however, and the boy becomes badly wounded. But thanks to a a life-saving potion and a drop of the lion’s blood mixing with his own, he eventually emerges stronger, faster, and with the heightened sense of a nature-bred killer. Sick of living in the spotlight of his dad’s permanently disapproving glare, Sergei leaves home and learns the ways of the jungle.
Eventually, Sergei — now going by Kraven — begins knocking off a growing list of poachers, corporate rascals and international kingpins. No one knows he’s the mysterious figure feared by the underworld and known as “the Hunter.” They tend to just think of him as a guy who runs around barefoot most days and appears to have done a lot of high-intensity abdominal crunches. Kraven tracks down Calypso (Ariana DeBose), the girl who gave him that life-saving elixir way back when, and who’s now a criminal lawyer in London. If you sensed they’d strike a deal in terms of finding and executing no-goodniks, because “sometimes the law can get in the way of justice,” we applaud your intuitiveness. If you also predicted this would play out in a chatty scene on a bench that goes on for five minutes but feels like it lasts 55 minutes, we truly admire your powers of precognition.
Then Kraven’s adult sibling Dimitri (Gladiator II‘s Fred Hechinger), who’s nicknamed the Chameleon — yes, Spider-Man readers, it’s that Chameleon — is abducted, and the hunter is motivated by more than just righteousness in his hunt. It’s, like, personal now! There’s more, involving a mercenary known as the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola, chewing that scenery) and Pops Kravinoff’s business holdings and an assassin named the Foreigner (Chistopher Abbott) who has some sort of power involving hypnotism, or maybe he stops time? We’re not sure, though we can confirm he looks cool in sunglasses.
None of these peripheral characters feel fully sketched out, despite the actors trying to liven things up; at least Crowe lends gravitas and a sense of anarchy to his nightmare of a patriarch, and Nivola seems to be having fun prior to his CGI transformation thing. Chandor tries to keep things moving with chases and wirework and a lot of exploding squibs, occasionally dropping an image of Kraven in silhouette or a figure moving in a wide shot that suggests a sensibility behind the camera. The script by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway feels messed with and doctored up in all of the wrong ways, with a few exchanges (“You’re a lunatic.””You’re just figuring that out now?”) that demand whoever punched things up are morally obligated to give their payments back.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for how so much died on the operating table here. The death knell, however, might have been the choice of a lead. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is handsome, in prime action-hero shape, and completely fits the definition of a modern-day matinee idol. On paper, the guy screams movie star. Onscreen, he has a nagging tendency to suck the oxygen out of almost every scene he’s in. When Taylor-Johnson shows up in smaller roles, as in Bullet Train, The Fall Guy or the upcoming Nosferatu, or is simply one person among many pointing at green screens (see: Godzilla), his black-hole presence is offset by other factors. Let him don the lion’s-mane vest of a major character like this, however, and it doesn’t matter how many times you let him run across walls or leap into the fray. You’ll have an energy drain on your hands. And when it comes to potentially limping your already wounded cinematic universe across a finishing line (we hope), this is not something the film’s patrons can afford. We don’t know whether Kraven the Hunter is truly the final bow of the SSMU. It is undoubtedly a self-inflicted killshot.
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