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Poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson. We admit that as a preternaturally handsome man and talented actor who in the right role can smolder, he doesn’t need our sympathies. (Seriously check out his sinister good ol’ boy on the Texan frontier in Nocturnal Animals and realize that’s the same English chap who played a perfect American zero in Kick-Ass.) Even so, here is a guy who’s got rizz for days, yet every time he is plugged into an American blockbuster, it’s in one of the most insipid and bleakly impersonal of studio products.
And as Kraven the Hunter is the latest Spider-Man-less Spidey movie from Sony Pictures, you know that trend is not changing this weekend. Hoo boy, does it not change. Already preemptively made a lame, orphaned duck before it opens, with Sony publicly throwing in the towel and announcing an end to whatever this shared cinematic universe was supposed to be called, Kraven the Hunter arrives with the humblest of expectations, and still somehow shows up to the safari with two empty barrels.
What makes it worse is there are at least some semblances of care being entertained in the margins, something which never seriously entered the picture for Madame Web or Morbius. Not that long ago, director J.C. Chandor helmed thrilling little character studies like All Is Lost and A Most Violent Year, and he assembled a murderer’s row of talent to be squandered beyond just Taylor-Johnson on this one.
There are also two Oscar winners in the cast by way of Russell Crowe and Ariana DeBose, plus the always watchable Alessandro Nivola; even one of Gladiator II’s fun weirdo emperors, Fred Hechinger, is on hand to weird it up some more as the guy who becomes the Chameleon (in case you ever needed an origin for Spidey’s mute shapeshifting rogue). Wasted all.
The movie is so vacuous, so bereft of life in spite of its many desperate and quality actors trying to quicken the cadaver with wasted energy, that it eerily resembles the cobbled together emptiness of the worst 2000s superhero time-wasters. Then again, Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman previously oversaw production on the lowest common denominator nerd baubles of yesteryear like X-Men Origins: Wolverine while producer Avi Arad was producer on train wrecks of that era like Elektra and Ghost Rider, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising Kraven the Hunter feels like a throwback to the days where “fan service” was something done through gritted teeth.
Handicapped from the jump due to the fact that there is only one great Spider-Man story with Kraven in it, and this is not it, Kraven the Hunter’s screenplay—credited to Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (whether they like it or not)—reimagines comicdom’s Great White Hunter into a superpowered eco terrorist. Maybe. He could also just be an assassin working for himself. It’s vague, and in the end it seems even Kraven is pretty uncommitted to whatever it is he’s doing in any given scene.
What we know for sure is that Sergei Kravinoff (Taylor-Johnson) was raised by an awful caricature of toxic masculinity, Papa Nikolai (Crowe), to be a tough killer. But after Sergei is mauled by a lion as a boy during an African safari, a nearby child of a “mystic” (so as to avoid troubling voodoo implications from the comics) conveniently appears to give young Kravinoff a magic potion that cures his injuries and gifts him with superpowers to boot. Sntached.
Afterward, he swears never to hunt again with anything more than his bare hands, and furthermore instead of animals he will track bad dudes like his papa, just not actually his papa. Even a bored, wasted Russell Crowe is too valuable a commodity to kill off in the first act. So now just “Kraven” grows up to be known in the press as The Hunter, a mysterious vigilante killing bad men all around the world. He’s also estranged from his father, protective of his weak younger brother Dimitri (Hechinger), and that rando fur enthusiast who turns up like a half-forgotten Tendr date who now wants brunch in the life of Calypso (DeBose). She was the convenient mystic child who saved his life on the savanna, and now she’s grown up to be the conveniently high-powered London attorney who can further advance the plot whenever needed.
Kraven will pinball in scenes between all these characters and more, including Nivola’s Rhino, a skinny crime lord (don’t worry, he gets bigger) and the Rhino’s right hand man (Christopher Abbott’s the Foreigner, faintly registering as present on the supervillain roll call). Together, those two hatch a scheme to turn Kraven’s predator into prey for… reasons. Bwahahaha.
There is obviously a lot of plot at work in Kraven the Hunter, and all of it appears derivative from other, better films. While the movie has made noise in the press over the fact that this is Sony’s first R-rated picture based on a superhero comic book, it resembles more John Wick in tone and temperament than the goofy gorefest of the Deadpool flicks. Perhaps it even has some hope of emulating the dramatic heft that James Mangold imbued the Wolverine character many years after X-Men Origins: Wolverine when the director stripped the character down to his acoustic fundamentals in Logan.
However, both of those movies know how to have fun in their own way, as does the slew of other pictures Kraven draws upon (think Batman Begins when Sergei meets with Calypso and plots, hazily, to take down “bad guys” in Ye Olde Foggy London Towne). But while flashes of the talent Chandor possesses appears in a few action beats, such as a long wide shot in an empty field where Kraven punishes a poacher and tall grass obscures our view from the carnage, the film’s action is largely just as rote and pedestrian as any overdose of CG blandness, only unlike Venom or Morbius, Kraven rips off a dude’s nose with his mouth in-camera.
(Ironically, the spectacle also gives this reviewer a new appreciation for how the fantastical elements of Venom and Morbius, be it alien goo or flying vampiric monsters, benefitted from not resembling anything in the real world. The human eye is far less forgiving of the CGI lions, cheetahs, and water buffalo.)
There’s plenty of action, but none of it feels any more thrilling than the rest of a deadened narrative that quickly devolves into a collection of walk-on appearances by various B or C-list Spider-Man villains from the comics. And the sheer obligatory nature of why the Foreigner is in this movie, or how the Chameleon’s shapeshifting reveal is squeezed in, raises a kind of genre movie paradox: Is fan service really serving anyone if it’s so devoid of joy and fun that even the fans will be bored?
Blinking moments of amusement admittedly occur, there to be savored like droplets of water discovered in the desert. Many of them have to do with the reliable comfort of being reminded Crowe is a fascinating performer to watch in any context, which here amounts to little better than seeing him make a run to the ATM. Nivola is also enjoyable, albeit his performance comes closer to simply mugging for the camera and making weird, Cageian choices. But hey, he did work with Cage in Face/Off, so…
It’s not a lot, but some intermittent ham instills the movie with fleeting moments of entertainment, like the flickers of innocence in poor little possessed Regan McNail’s body crying out for help. But there is no salvation for any of them. This is superhero cinema at its most damnable and damned. A hunt where the best outcome is for the mauling to be quick and done with.
Kraven the Hunter is in theaters on Friday, Dec. 13. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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