written by: Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway
produced by: Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach and David Householter
directed by: J.C. Chandor
rated: R for strong bloody violence and language.
runtime: 127 min.
U.S. release date: December 13, 2024
Is it possible that 2024 is the year that Sony’s Spider-Man Universe will end? Let’s hope so. From a critical perspective, their “Madam Web” movie released in February was laughably bad, and its second sequel, “Venom: The Last Dance,” was a murky CGI mess that dropped in October. Financially, the two movies bombed and underperformed, respectively, and it looks like the much-delayed “Kraven the Hunter” will receive a similar fate. That’s what happens when you build a Spider-Man Universe without a Spider-Man.
That said, Sony’s decision-makers felt that all of this was fine at some point. They had no problem with the derision of those movies from fans of comics and superhero movies, including 2022’s Morbius, which should’ve never left the editing room. So baffling is their rationale that an in-depth documentary detailing how all this went down would likely be more entertaining than all five of these movies combined.
Nevertheless, “Kraven the Hunter” is here, and despite having two Oscar winners in the cast, this movie, which revolves around a younger version of a lesser-known Spider-Man foe that debuted in the comics back in 1964, is an undeveloped mess that attempts to do too much with too little. The material is half-baked, and most actors are either woefully miscast or unintentionally hilarious. It’s hard to fathom what director J.C. Chandor (“Margin Call” and “A Most Violent Year”) saw in this project. Still, his last film, 2019’s “Triple Frontier,” at least proved that he’s adept with the action/adventure genre, so maybe this could at least be a decent action flick. Sadly, that’s not the case here.
The movie’s first 10 minutes follow the titular character (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) being transported to a remote Russian prison with other prisoners. He gets escorted to his cell, ruffles feathers with the right roughnecks, kills an arms dealer (Yuri Kolokolnikov), and then escapes with ease. How does he escape? By running out into the desolate snowy landscape where a cargo plane awaits him. This is his own plane, or quite possibly owned by the female pilot (whose face we never see and who we’re never introduced to), but that’s not something this movie will get into. We never even see her face, so why should we care if it doesn’t matter to the screenwriters and the director? Still, it’s one of many nagging questions in “Kraven the Hunter,” barely begun.
Any questions we have will be erased by the sight of shirtless Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s 146 abdominal muscles. There he is in the empty cargo hold as the plane takes off, turning around so the camera (and you, dear viewer) can marvel (heh heh) at all the months of training the actor underwent for a character hardly anyone knows about. His impossibly impressive torso is really the only reason to see this movie, but I digress.
After this opener, we leave Johnson’s abs and spend a good deal of time (probably too much) in the past as we learn the origin of a character we just spent roughly 10 minutes with. Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller) and his brother, Dmitri Kravinoff (Billy Barratt), are teenage brothers who their father has just picked up from a boarding school in New York. While in their father’s limo, he tells them that their “weak-minded” mother has killed herself. Yeesh. Both boys are bereft with the sudden news. Sergei asks if they’re being taken to the funeral, but their father, Nikolai Kravinof (Russell Crowe), a Russian crime lord and drug trafficker, states plainly that they are going hunting “to be men.” It’s obvious just by this introductory exchange that Crowe’s daddy (with his Boris Basdenov accent) will be the villain here or, at the very least, the root cause of everything wrong with the Kravinoff brothers. Daddy even prefers Sergei over the “weak” Dmitri. It turns out he’s one of many bad guys in this movie, not counting the titular Spider-Man villain.
While on the aforementioned hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei is severely wounded by a poorly rendered CGI lion while trying to protect Dmitri. He is found by Calypso (Diaana Babnicova), the granddaughter of a voodoo priestess, who bestows her with a magical serum that supposedly contains special powers. As near-dead Sergei lies on the ground with the blood of his lion attacker having meticulously dropped into an open wound, cinematographer Ben Davis (“Kick-Ass” and “Eternals”) zooms into the boy’s bloodstream like a scene out of “Innerspace,” where we see the lion’s blood combining with his human blood. What would happen if Calypso saved Sergei’s life by pouring some of her serum down the throat of this random white kid? Why? Is she extraordinarily empathetic? We never find out. You’d be right if you guessed that young Kravinoff has transformed into an apex predator with super strength and heightened animal senses.
Fast forward years later and we find that Sergei is now known as The Hunter (Taylor-Johnson), or rather “Kraven the Hunter”. He’s got a “to-die” list of scumbags to kill, which makes it hard for us to see how this character will evolve into a villain, but none of the three screenwriters involved thought about that. Sergei had left his brother with their father, and Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) wound up developing the latent talent of mimicry, able to sound like anyone he hears, which he utilizes in this father’s nightclub, emulating the likes of Harry Styles and Gershwin at the piano. At this point, one wonders what is happening in this movie and why anyone should care.
Inevitably and unsurprisingly, Sergei reconnects with Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who is now a well-connected lawyer with a bizarre fashion sense. She also winds up lending her summer camp archery skills! Seriously. Sergei hopes she’ll help him with his list, and we’re hoping Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose will fire her agent because a bad role in a bloated and bloody movie is not a good decision. Meanwhile, Russian mercenary Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a wanna-be gangster who was insulted by Nikolai years ago and has had it out for the Kravinof family ever since, sets to take out Kraven the Hunter. Aleksei goes by The Rhino in the mercenary underworld because, well, he has a physical condition that gives him the strength and appearance (?!?!) of a rhinoceros (just so Sony can utilize yet another Spider-Man villain in a movie that doesn’t include Spider-Man) from an experimental serum, enlisting the assistance of Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), a mysterious assassin with ridiculous hypnosis powers. To lure Sergei, Aleksei kidnaps Dmitri, who has now gone from a good brother to yet another Spider-Man villain – all because we’re in a Spider-Man Movie Without a Spider-Man – while maintaining his cowardice.
If the three screenwriters involved didn’t rely on clunky exposition and weak characterization, “Kraven the Hunter” wouldn’t be all that bad. I doubt it, though, since this inert and muddled is just an overall pointless endeavor. Taylor-Johnson deserves an action flick that isn’t as dumbed down and wholly reliant on blood violence for entertainment, but he’s a grown adult, so he should’ve known better. I hope he and everyone else involved in this movie had fu,n though, since they’re likely the only ones who did. I also hope that Chandor steers clear of franchises or at least ones produced by a studio that doesn’t know when to quit.
RATING: *1/2
