Movie Review ~ Kraven the Hunter

Even as a casual fan of the Marvel comics, I’ve struggled to find the good in the diminishing returns of Sony’s Marvel-adjacent universe.  Aside from their lucrative Spider-Man adventures, their solo films featuring secondary characters have been largely hit or miss, cinematic curiosities that operate in a realm where continued desperation for franchise starters masquerades as creativity.  Opening 2024 with the infamous bomb Madame Web (which I’ve yet to get caught up in) and barely putting effort into promoting October’s final chapter in the Venom trilogy (Venom: The Last Dance), the studio is ending the year with its long-delayed Kraven the Hunter. 

An R-rated attempt to gain inroads with the much-desired Deadpool fanbase, Kraven the Hunter is the latest evidence that only some comic book characters deserve (or can sustain) their own feature film.  It’s more of an uninspired excavation of Z-list characters appealing to deep-cut loyalists than anything else, definitely not the apex box-office predator Sony was hoping for when they put it into production for release in January 2023.  Technical missteps and flat performances further showcase everything currently wrong with modern superhero (or anti-hero) cinema.

Though drawn as a nemesis to Spider-Man in the comics, on the big screen, Sergei Kravinoff, aka The Hunter, aka Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Godzilla), is portrayed as a muscular anti-hero that uses his feral powers gained through voodoo magic to take down criminals.  The script is so all over the map that it’s unclear what exactly Kraven is setting out to stop. Is it big game hunting?  Or is it his estranged father (Russell Crowe, The Water Diviner), a surly man’s man with a ruthless business model?  With no clear goal, there are no stakes to set or raise.  There’s a particular focus on the protection of family. However, the film has suffered from so much post-production retooling that any semblance of a through line is constantly thwarted by jarring tonal shifts that render it completely shapeless.

The lack of form also spills over into the performances, with Taylor-Johnson’s brooding physicality outweighing any compelling characterization.  Sony has a track record of taking interesting actors (Tom Hardy in Venom, Jared Leto in Morbius, Dakota Johnson in Madame Web) and constraining them within screenplays, casting them as expensive set decorations rather than fully formed characters.  When the screenplay is equal parts self-serious and unintentionally comical, these actors can’t help but look bad on account of the material and be pulled deeper into a bland vortex.

Even more regrettable are the supporting players saddled with clunky dialogue for their characters, whose motivations appear to change from scene to scene.  Crowe’s accent jumps around by full continents. Despite his best efforts to snarl through the kooky dialogue, he’s mainly phoning this one in, having played a gruff, disappointing father figure countless times before.  As Dimitri, Kraven’s brother (and the Chameleon in waiting), Fred Hechinger (Gladiator II) competes with Alessandro Nivola’s (The Brutalist) Rhino for the most unintendedly earnest camp performance, the result of editing that has altered both roles into looking garishly nonessential.  There’s something there to suggest the film’s delirious potential to be a tongue-in-cheek adventure, but they barely register as pivotal characters.  Christopher Abbott’s (The World to Come) Foreigner—a villain given inexplicable time-freezing powers here—spends more time perfecting his Blue Steel pose than presenting any credible threat.

A single ray of light in this dank darkness is Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose (West Side Story).  Despite being done dirty with truly bizarre post-production editing that literally puts new words into her mouth, she makes it through the film as the sole cast member who knows exactly what film she’s walked into.  As Calypso Ezili, her energetic performance—complete with Dynasty-worthy shoulder pads—injects a much-needed strength into an otherwise limp ensemble.  I’m not sure how well it bodes for her longevity that DeBose was also in the equally terrible Argylle in early 2024. However, emerging unscathed from both says something about her ability to engage the audience.

Known for his intelligent, character-driven dramas like A Most Violent Year and receiving an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of 2011’s Margin Call, director J.C. Chandor seems far out of his element in this genre.   Squandering every opportunity to develop an origin story into something of value, he can’t find focus within the aimless script, and the little energy put into the film quickly sputters whenever it pauses to take a breath.  There’s a bewildering scene between Kraven and Calypso where they do nothing but talk to one another, trading mountains of exposition, the movie’s lame way of filling in the blanks that have either been edited out or gone unfilmed.

Action sequences—which should be a highlight for a movie about the legendary hunter—are unimaginative and repetitive, a glaring issue for a genre that thrives on making our pulses race in excitement.  Despite nearly two years of post-production tinkering, on a technical level, the film is a full-on disaster class.  Visual effects are either barely passable or outright laughable, making you realize that a 130-million-dollar budget doesn’t buy much in the way of decent CGI.

The movie has about five endings, one of which directly contradicts another, and it leaves viewers with a final image that is so silly in a Calin Klein ad-esque way that it provoked genuine laughter from my screening audience.  Calling the film bad would suggest a significant effort was made to correct the glaring errors, but one glance at the opening titles tells you that the filmmakers gave up on this one long ago.   The cardinal sin of filmmaking is not to make a terrible movie; it’s to make a dull one, and Kraven the Hunter is so profoundly disconnected from entertainment, so determined to strip mine IP and prioritize brand recognition, that it winds up as a fascinating study in total irrelevancy.