Kraven the Hunter Does the World a Favor By Putting Sony's Spider-Man Universe Out of its Misery
I'm not sure this motion picture needed to be made.
The wonderful meta conceit of Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, a simultaneously loving and scathing satire of comic book mythology and cinematic exploitation, is that every superhero in the world has gotten a cinematic vehicle except the Teen Titans, who are more than ready for the limelight.
When I saw that Kraven the Hunter, nobody’s favorite Spider-Man villain, was getting his own 120 million-dollar vehicle as part of Sony's Spider-Man Universe, a Dark Universe/Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-level boondoggle, it felt like a gag from the acclaimed film adaptation of the superhero team-up cartoon.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe asked why filmmakers have lazily focussed on Spider-Man and A-list super-villains like Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Mysterio, Electro, Kingpin, and Vulture when they can exploit the public’s non-existent affection for B and C listers like Madame Web, Morbius, Ezekiel Sims and, of course, Kraven the Hunter.
No one was craving a vehicle for Marvel’s murderous manimal, yet that did not stop the misguided fools at Sony from making a tentpole blockbuster based on the character anyway.
Sony foolishly entrusted J.C. Chandor with the sacred task of bringing everyone's fourteenth favorite Spider-Man villain to the big screen in violent defiance of God’s Will and the will of the moviegoing public. Chandor is a commercial veteran who has graduated to helming serious movies for grown-ups like Margin Call, All Is Lost, and A Most Violent Year.
He segued into action with 2019’s Triple Frontier before prostituting his gifts with a wild left turn into comic book nonsense with Kraven the Hunter.
Chandor’s somber aesthetic proves wildly inappropriate for the material. He’s maddeningly intent on making a heavy family drama that just happens to involve a great white hunter who suggests a psychotic Doctor Doolittle with a body count.
Kraven hunts the most dangerous game—people! Bad people. And probably people with redeeming facets as well. People are complicated. We’re never entirely good or bad, but Kraven the Hunter will murder us all the same.
Do we need a Kraven the Hunter movie? I’m not sure that we do! I strongly suspect that society would survive just fine without a feature film vehicle for this half-ass also-ran of a villain.
If a movie’s worth were determined by the state of the abdominal muscles of its lead, then Kraven the Hunter would sweep the Oscars. Star Aaron Johnson-Taylor (Kick Ass, Kick Ass 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron) is seriously shredded.
Alas, ab definition is just one of many factors to consider when judging a film, and by every other measure, Kraven the Hunter is a crashing bore and sleepy mistake.
Kraven the Hunter’s first act is dominated by an endless flashback to the protagonist’s youth, which stops the film cold before it can begin.
In these scenes, li’l Kraven the Hunter chafes under the cruel parenting of Nikolai Kravinov (Russell Crowe), a domineering, black-hearted drug kingpin and sub-par father who coldly informs his sons Sergei/Kraven the Hunter (Levi Miller and later Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Dmitri (Billy Barratt and later Fred Hechinger), that their mother committed suicide because she was weak, something he despises above all else.
Kraven grows up with major daddy issues. He struggles to wiggle out of his old man’s outsized shadow and expectations and pursue his own desires instead of acting as an extension of his hated and feared father.
In a rare non-exorcist role, Crowe welcomes the opportunity to overact egregiously in a new genre. The heavyweight thespian dominates the proceedings as thoroughly as he rules his family.
A lion nearly killed Kraven during a hunt gone bad as a teenager. He is saved by Calypso, a Voodoo princess who gives the brooding young man a magical elixir that gives him super strength, speed, agility, indestructibility, and, one would imagine, an absolutely massive dong. Call him Kraven the Plumber because he is laying some serious pipe.
That’s not true here, of course. In Kraven the Hunter, the homicidal hunk is sexy yet asexual. Calypso is supposed to be his love interest and savior, but she’s drawn with even less depth than the titular villain.
Kraven the Hunter finds Kraven dealing with family drama while squaring off against Aleksei Sytsevich, the low-level Russian mobster who will become the Rhino, but not until the film's end. Kraven the Hunter teases us sadistically and pointlessly by showing the character becoming increasingly rhino-like in each successive scene but hides the big reveal for the end.
What should be a big reveal has a miniscule impact. Aleksei Sytsevich/Rhino has more screen time than he did when Paul Giamatti very briefly played him in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but he’s every bit as underwhelming.
That holds true of other secondary villains as well, such as The Chameleon, who turns out to be our anti-hero’s half-brother, and the mercenary Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).
There are a lot of supervillains in Kraven the Hunter. Do you know what it could use? A superhero. Would it have killed Marvel to have Spider-Man stop by to see what kind of colorful adventures his old pal Kraven was up to against this colorful backdrop?
Spidey wouldn’t have to stick around long. He could even break the fourth wall and wink knowingly at the camera at the end of his cameo. But it would be nice to have an A or even B-list figure from the Spider-Man universe in the film.
Sony is insane enough to think that Spider-Man is so popular that audiences suffering from serious superhero fatigue will pay good money to see bad movies in which he never actually appears despite existing in their universe.
They say that insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome. I would argue that the true definition of insanity is greenlighting Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter and expecting a different response each time.
Though his abdominal muscles are impressive, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance is less than kick-ass. Like the rest of the film, it’s grim, mirthless, and strangely lacking in levity and humor, though I did enjoy it when he leaps about like a parkour enthusiast with amazing powers.
This is a silly supervillain movie about an animal lover/killer who moves like a lion or jaguar as well as a human being. It’s not Checkov. The filmmakers take everything way too seriously in a way that would spoil the fun if there was any fun to be spoiled.
Like Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter closes on what it delusionally imagines is an iconic moment of truth.
Having wasted over two hours of our precious time, Kraven the Hunter concludes with the forgettable villain receiving his trademark furry lion’s mane vest.
Kraven the Hunter is embracing his destiny. He’s coming into his own as a man and a villain.
If Kraven the Hunter had any fans, they would be losing their shit over a third-rate supervillain wearing the dumb costume onscreen that he’s worn in comic books for decades.
Kraven the Hunter similarly makes us wait a LONG time before we get to see Rhino in all of his indestructible, horny glory. It’s not worth the wait!
Kraven the Hunter lazily sets up a future that will not exist. The world did not and does not want a big-budget Kraven the Hunter movie. It wants sequels, spin-offs, and guest appearances in other Marvel movies even less.
This turkey killed the poignantly pathetic dream that is Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. So it accidentally accomplished something useful by bringing an appropriately dreary end to something that never should have existed in the first place.
Kraven is quite the hunter. His inexplicable vehicle scored quite the bounty in killing Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, or rather, putting it out of its misery.
So, if superhero action is what you crave, I’m afraid you will have to keep hunting because there is none to be found here.
One Star out of Five
::Do we need a Kraven the Hunter movie? I’m not sure that we do!::
It could've been worse—we might have gotten a "Hunter" Thompson movie instead!
Despite being named after the famous gonzo journalist (and sharing a last name with Peter's Frenemy Flash Thompson), he's a third-rate Kraven knockoff who popped up in the Seventies once or twice. I'm guessing somebody at Marvel created him in a moment of pique when whoever the current Editor-in-Chief was (until Jim Shooter in 1978, it was revolving door of EiCs—Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, Archie Goodwin) said they couldn't use Kraven for one reason of another.
Because of his name the character stuck in my mind somehow, which was fun when, during that brief period my former wife and I worked for Marvel, I threatened to make him the incoming baddie if our editor didn't choose somebody for us.
We also had a Karl Rove analogue who my wife, I thought brilliantly, made a devoted grandfather as well as an utter scumbag—I wanted to write a lot more about this guy once she put that twist on him!
Kraven did have a great story in kravens last hunt, a truly grisly story that involves him shooting spider man in the face, putting on his costume and trying to prove he's better. It's a masterpiece, taking spidey to dark places and somehow not being the edgelord mess it could've.
This film sounds like that mess. A film that doesn't get kraven in a dark place worked because he was the bad guy, a dying man desperate to prove his worth. Instead he's a muscly brooding anti hero for some reason. They can't even have him at least hunt animal villains like the recent game or the mediocre crossover with a great concept hunted, give it some spectacle. It has the issue most bad comic movies have focusing on "see see the thing" instead of writing a story. Sony was so desperate for it's own universe it failed to see the actual characters it could use and grasped at straws.