Kraven The Hunter

3 outta 5

Kraven The Hunter is the latest, and potentially final, attempt by Sony Pictures to spin off various Spider-Man characters into their own franchise, without actually using the webbed wall-crawler himself. The Venom series has been consistently fun and wacky throughout all three installments, although it has been more mixed (to say politely) with films about Morbius and Madam Web. Kraven the Hunter is a big Spider-Man bad guy who has decent storylines throughout the years. The film is just okay and takes so many liberties with the source material it ends up being a weird alternate reality interpretation of the characters. There’s cool stuff in Kraven although it drags a lot, especially at the start. Chop out about 20 minutes and it would be much more zippy. Still, the lead puts in some cool moments, though. Bonus points for a Miles Warren reference though, for another Spider-Man villain we will probably never see.

Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a protector of the land, taking out poachers and hunting men, known as Kraven the Hunter. As a teenager, lion blood gave him superhuman strength and agility, although he could never get the approval and love of his angry, domineering mob boss father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). His pianist brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), doesn’t want to enter the family killing business, instead improving his mimicry skills. But when a dangerous, superpowered killer, Aleksei Sytsevich aka the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) and his nasty sidekick The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), starts to cause problems, Kraven will have to save his brother, with the help of a beautiful voodoo priestess, Calypso (Ariana DeBose). While Rhino and Foreigner may be tough, Kraven can take as much as they can dish out, causing extremely messy carnage along the way.

Kraven himself has had different interpretations throughout the years from jacked up hunter guy who loves potions and poisons to someone who has been mutated into a superpowered panther-like half-man, half-human. This version sort of does both where Kraven is human, but he inherits cat-like reflexes from an accidental blood transfusion from a magic tiger or something. The explanation is weirdly glossed over and kind of like they stole the bit of She-Hulk getting her powers from Bruce Banner and glommed it onto Kraven. The film basically changes Kraven’s from hunting the most dangerous game to make him more of an environmentalist friend of the animals, saving beasts from poachers. At least some of the kills he does are amusingly nasty, and Taylor-Johnson has some funny and blase reactions to splattering people.

The whole movie kind of deviates a bit too far from the source in places. Rhino, a character that has also had various interpretations, is usually a guy in a suit/machine but here he has like this backpack attached to his hip and if he unplugs it, he morphs into the rampaging Rhino. Nivola has some fun nasty line deliveries but also some incredibly weird performance choices, like when he is told his nefarious scheme didn’t work out he… sort of silently screams or whatever. Anyway, his reaction is dopey. Also, he has a few lines where he says something about how deadly Rhinos are and it doesn’t come off as scary, it’s just that this guy really knows too much about Rhinos. He gets hardened skin and grows huge, but it feels more like a Rock Man than Rhino. The film teases his transformation throughout but when it actually happens it’s over too quickly.

Sometimes the action kicks in with some satisfyingly messy splatter, in one case literally as a trap that Kraven has laid out makes mincemeat of unlucky goons. Some of Taylor-Johnson’s little reactions are hilarious, like when he uses a crossbow to nonchalantly dispose of some guys, or when he walks into an office soaking wet and hollers at an underling to get him a towel. Also, amusing is Crowe as the bad dad, mostly because he says things in such a ridiculously broad accent and his lines are just small variations upon how one must hunt, be strong, and various ways his sons have disappointed him. One villain who isn’t funny or scary is Abbott as the Foreigner, who is seemingly defined by wearing sunglasses and has powers that involve him counting down from three and then it gets all blurry.

There’s a lot of dull flashbacks about Kraven first getting his powers and a few flashes of Kraven’s depressed mom that are random bummer shots that count as thematic depth. The younger brother is used as kidnap bait and being called a chameleon. He gets a one-minute scene at the end which teases a more comic accurate version of The Chameleon. It’s a cool minute but not much else. Calypso’s character is mostly voodoo cliches about her as a lawyer by day and spellcaster at night. She may be a romantic interest with Kraven, it’s hard to tell. He has more chemistry with his weaponry than her.

If this is the end of the Spider-Man character spin-off universe, then Kraven The Hunter is a lackluster finale. This may have led to a Sinister Six film, but that will probably never happen. There was a fantastic Sinister Six movie in Spider-Man: No Way Home, though. Still Kraven has some nifty performance bits and when characters stop yapping and deliver chaos, it gets satisfyingly messy.