Director: J.C. Chandor Starring: Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott Running Time: 126 minutes
Sergei ‘Kraven’ Kravinoff is a hunter. The press in the film (rather unimaginatively) refers to him as ‘The Hunter’. Sergei himself prefers ‘Kraven’, though with the proviso that, “anyone who knows that name is dead”. His ally, Calypso, is called Calypso. If this movie establishes nothing else, it’s the names of its two lead characters, presumably because it imagines that you’ll have forgotten their names two minutes after being introduced to them. I would forgive them for thinking that.
Kraven the Hunter is the sixth and final film in the short-lived and much-derided Sony Spider-Man Universe, and it is arguably the film that had the most hype among fans of Spider-Man comics after the series was slated. The character of Kraven is a Steve Ditko and Stan Lee creation, part of the original 1960s crew of Spider-Man villains, most of whom have already featured across different Spider-Man films (Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, Electro, The Green Goblin) and the character has much stronger name-recognition than other SSU characters such as Morbius or Madame Web. As has been the case with many Sony and MCU projects, the film’s announcement was coupled with the introduction of a well-known and admired director of smaller budget films to the superhero filmmaking arena (J.C. Chandor, director of films like Margin Call and A Most Violent Year) and a star looking to launch their own franchise (Aaron Taylor Johnson). Despite this hype, the film’s release has been delayed several times. Completed in mid-2022 and originally slated to be released in January of 2023, it was first delayed to October 2023, presumably after the extremely negative response to Morbius, and then again by nearly a full year to August 2024 due to the WGA Writers Strike. It was then delayed a final time to its present release date of December 13th 2024.
The film opens, as promised, with Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Sergei doing some hunting, specifically hunting a Russian gangster in the Siberian prison in which he’s incarcerated, and subsequently murdering him with a tiger’s tooth, but not before we see some of the same outstandingly bad ADR-dubbing of Johnson’s Russian dialogue, just as we saw earlier this year with Tahar Rahim’s character in Madame Web. The film’s 16 Rating promised fans a no-holds-barred, gory slaughterfest, as befitting the animalistic titular character, and it delivers on that with several bloody kills right from the outset.
We then flash back to a young Sergei and his brother, Dmitri, suffering under the gruff patriarchy of their father, Nikolai, another Russian gangster with a penchant for big-game hunting. Crowe continues his streak of hilarious accents by essentially reusing his Italian accent from The Pope’s Exorcist with more emphasis on his H’s. Nikolai is determined to make his sons into ruthless killers like him by having them shoot CGI blob lions with double-barrel shotguns. They come across one such blob (which may have wandered off the set of Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa: The Lion King) which attacks Sergei in a Revenant-esque moment of brutality. The lion drags him off after taking several shots from Nikolai’s rifle, and Sergei and the lion are discovered by a young girl named Calypso who has wandered off after being on safari with her parents. The fact that they are on a flat, open plain nearby to where a group of hunters are firing at lions is seemingly not what has drawn her to find Sergei, but rather some unexplained mystic precognition influenced by a deck of what appear to be standard tarot cards. A drop of lion’s blood falls into Sergei’s wounds and, combined by a mysterious elixir which Calypso administers to the dying Sergei, and through the magic of splitting cells being emulsified in yellow goo, he gains the agility, speed and strength of a lion (or a wolf…or a cheetah…or maybe a monkey? It’s rather unclear.) If you were still unclear about what has happened, the helicopter which rescues him has the call-sign G-NHAC to really put a fine point on this moment of cinematic subtlety.
After his rapid recovery, he decides that he has had enough of his father’s accent and garish décor of animal heads and subsequently escapes, leaving his half-brother Dmitri behind. He stows away aboard a cargo ship and ends up on the open grassland of ‘Far Eastern Russia’ where he bonds with some buffalo, and decides that his mortal enemies are immoral poachers, forging his future as a man who uses his extraordinary abilities to brutally murder people with knives. In present day, this ongoing vigilante project puts him at loggerheads with his father’s enemy, Alessandro Nivola’s villain Alexei ‘The Rhino’ Sytsevich, and his loyal assassin known only as ‘The Foreigner’ (Christopher Abbott) and also reunites him with Calypso (Ariana DeBose). Calypso and Kraven join forces to rescue Dmitri (played as an adult by Fred Hechinger) who is kidnapped by The Rhino so that he can assert dominance over Nikolai Kravinoff’s rival criminal enterprise. Confused? Well, there’s a lot going on. A lot of nicknames, a lot of bizarre character motivations, and a LOT of shirtless Aaron Taylor Johnson, which would distract anyone.
It’s amazing that we are now over twenty years into the ‘Superhero Era’ of blockbuster films and yet origin stories still prove to be a seemingly impossible formula to get right. The weight of ‘character backstory’ means that the first act is often a dreary, accelerated, barely-coherent mess of plot beats, and by the fifty-minute mark, the film has to scramble to assemble a new three-act structure to give us a reason for showing up. Kraven the Hunter is no different in that regard, and haphazard editing based on extensive reshoots renders some of the dialogue incomprehensible, such as when Kraven goes on a strange, out-of-context two-minute boast to Calypso about how he’s the greatest hunter who’s ever lived when they are trying to formulate a plan of how to save his brother. Ultimately, the plot boils down to a long-winded introduction to Kraven followed by an hour long race to save his brother that feels at-once breathless and condensed, but also exhaustingly long. The film is largely rescued from being an insufferable slog by some enjoyably vicious kills and CGI so bad that it becomes an entertaining artistic choice on behalf of the filmmakers (The Rhino in his final form is such a bafflingly terrible piece of computer animation that it could spawn entire schools of thought on So-Bad-It’s-Good cinema.)
The cast, despite the suspect material they’re working with, are all having a blast, and the performances blend well with the film’s sillier elements. Alessandro Nivola, an excellent actor and debatably the greatest Newcastle-to-Real Madrid signing in history, hams it up admirably as a weedy Russian gangster with dreams of power. Christopher Abbott, who starred in a movie called On the Count of Three, does a lot of counting to three as an assassin who can cause three-second memory delay if he looks in your eyes, and Abbott does a lot of ‘knowledgeable weirdo’ assassin stuff, and bestows a lot of bizarre and excessive praise on Kraven which makes us wonder what age Johnson’s character is supposed to be. Fred Hechinger, in a shocking turn of events after Gladiator 2, changes it up and decides to play a Weird Little Guy.
The worst work comes from the central pairing of Johnson and DeBose, though neither is particularly to blame. DeBose, who has had a rather unfortunate streak of films since her Oscar win for West Side Story, is asked to play an underwritten character, and because she is styled with elements of traditional African dress and has ties to African mysticism that is never explored in any meaningful detail beyond one conversation with her grandmother, the character becomes an unfortunate racial trope in the muddled second act. Her employment status as a lawyer who is vocally opposed to criminal corruption but who works for a firm that has myriad connections to the criminal underworld highlights how the character is used more as a plot convenience than anything else. Johnson, back for another bite of the superhero apple after playing the second-best Quicksilver in the MCU (“you didn’t see that coming”), is asked to be dour and burdened-with-great-responsibility, as so many leads in the worst of these films are. This, of course, is fundamentally the opposite of what he is good at.
As recent memorable supporting roles in Tenet, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy have shown, Johnson is a charm machine, at his best when he’s being a good-looking rogue, not unlike Brad Pitt in the early 90s. Without even a love story to work with, Johnson is asked mainly to jump into digitally-created canvasses, look menacingly at others, and tense his abs as hard as he can. It is also extremely hard to take him seriously in this movie when you realise that his yellow eyes, denoting his animal instincts taking over, make him look eerily similar to Rob McElhenney’s Mac in ‘The Nightman Cometh’ episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
With this film marking the end of the SSU, it’s unlikely that Kraven could be used as an argument for any continuation of the larger project. At its best, the film, like Madame Web before it, has a sort of campy fun to it, with a bit of gratuitous violence for good measure. At its worst, it’s like the rest of the SSU: an at-best mediocre idea edited into complete gibberish by studio meddling, and laced with some of the worst computer effects that a multi-billion dollar company could muster. If the delays to Kraven were intended to give it a fairer shake, it also seems the moviegoing public aren’t willing to acquiesce, with box-office projections for the film lower than any film in the series so far. It’s hard to rank a series that is so uniformly poor. This film is better-made than Morbius and perhaps Madame Web also, but it’s also likely the ugliest film in the franchise and harder-to-follow than any of them. All the same, it’s an entertaining night at the movies, particularly if your fiancée laughs hysterically every time Kraven impales someone on a pole, which is a surprising number of times.
It’s a shame the SSU characters will never get to have their team-up movie, robbing us of our chance to watch Kraven tell Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web that he’s afraid of spiders, so that she can reply that her mom “was researching spiders in the Amazon right before she died”, look to camera, and wink.
(2 / 5)