PLOT: As a boy, Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) was mauled by a lion, only to be saved by a mysterious serum that granted him amazing physical and mental powers. Abandoning the criminal empire run by his father (Russell Crowe), Sergei, now known as Kraven, hunts down evildoers, only to be pulled back into his father’s orbit when his half-brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is kidnapped.
REVIEW: It’s gotten to the point now that when you see the Sony logo before an “in association with Marvel” banner, you can’t help but cringe. The live-action films the studio has made based on Spider-Man’s rogues gallery have been pretty terrible, with Morbius and Madame Web ranking among the worst superhero films ever. The fact that the Venom trilogy was mediocre is something of a triumph for the beleaguered slate of films, but for a while now, the director of Kraven the Hunter, J.C. Chandor, has been promising this would be different.
I went into the movie with decently high hopes, as I’d seen twenty minutes of footage a few weeks ago before interviewing Aaron Taylor-Johnson (look for our interview soon), and liked what I saw. I also think Chandor is a great director, having been a fan of all of his previous films, in particular A Most Violent Year and the underrated Triple Frontier. Sadly, the film is a total mess in a way the isolated bits of footage I saw earlier didn’t reveal.
Like other movies in the Spider-Verse, it feels made by committee, with any of the interesting elements Chandor brings to the film having been washed away in a sea of re-shoots and (I presume) re-edits. The script is a mess, with it never clear just exactly why Kraven hunts down evildoers and if he profits from it (his sprawling jungle hideaway and private pilot makes it seem like he does), with it loaded with corny dialogue that I find it impossible to believe comes from the pen of co-screenwriter Richard Wenk (known to be a very solid scribe).
The tone of the movie is all over the place. For one thing, this is meant to be a hard R-action film, but there’s a lengthy, twenty-minute section featuring Sergei as a child that feels out of a YA fantasy film and will likely cause a massive chunk of the audience to tune out. When it starts to happen, the action is gory, but the choreography and editing make the action sequences hard to decipher, with no real standout moments to speak of.
Every once in a while, you get a glimmer of what Chandor might be going for, with the opening ten-minute sequence (partly scored to Basil Poledouris’s music from The Hunt for Red October) having a stylishness and sense of pace, the rest of the movie doesn’t have. The script and many of the performances are pretty clunky, with Ariana DeBose as Kraven’t a future love interest – Calypso stuck with some clunky exposition she has a hard time delivering (who could blame her).
The villains are a mixed bag, with Alessandro Nivola camping it up as Rhino. At the same time, Christopher Abbott delivers a quiet, almost method-like performance as an assassin based on the comic’s The Foreigner, who shows up too late to make any impact. The best of the three baddies is Russell Crowe as Sergei’s dad, but his screen time is sadly limited.
All of which leaves us with Aaron Taylor-Johnson. So here’s the thing – Johnson is good as Kraven. He’s got the physical look and a sense of humour that makes me think he could be an A-plus action hero if given the chance. But, they give him next to nothing to work with, with the dialogue often atrocious and groan-worthy, while the movie’s concept about it being the birth of a super-villain is laughably tacked on in the last five minutes.
While Chandor has advocated for the film throughout its lengthy production, I can’t help but feel like his version of the movie is not what we’re seeing here. Everyone’s been promising this would be “grounded,” but it’s also a movie featuring a man transforming into a rhinoceros. The CGI animals are poorly rendered and are bound to elicit chuckles from the audience that turns out to see this over the holidays.
Kraven the Hunter’s failure is a shame, as Aaron Taylor-Johnson is well-cast, and had he been left to his own devices, I think Chandor would have delivered a good movie (heck – maybe there’s a fantastic director’s cut sitting on a hard drive somewhere). This feels like one of the bad superhero movies Fox regularly churned out in the 2000s. It’s marginally better than Madame Web or Morbius, but it’s still far from being a legitimately good film – although there was potential.