VERDICT: This absurd (and violent) Spider-Man spinoff plays it so straight that it’s quite frequently hilarious, whether or not that was the intent.
Out-pacing most of 2024’s comedies on the laughs-per-minute scale — albeit unintentionally — Kraven the Hunter offers the spectacle of talented individuals on both sides of the camera trying to make chicken salad out of a nonsensical script.
Those talents include not only a pair of Oscar winners (Ariana DeBose and Russell Crowe) but also director J.C. Chandor, who scored one of contemporary cinema’s most impressive trifectas with his first three features: Margin Call, All Is Lost, and A Most Violent Year.
Chandor gives this Sony-Marvel paycheck gig far more than it gives him; for all his efforts at making the globe-trotting action sequences pop, he’s let down by an absurd story and dialogue so predictable that audience members will be tempted to shout the lines before the actors can.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven, aka The Hunter, a stalker and killer of evil men who operates in the shadows and is considered by many to be an urban legend. After we see him break into and out of a Russian prison to take out a gun-running gang leader — and honestly, David Harbour powered through these gulag moments more effectively in Black Widow and on Stranger Things — we get a flashback.
Sixteen years earlier, young Sergei (Levi Miller, A Wrinkle in Time) went on safari with his Russian gangster father Nikolai (Crowe), who was on the trail of a legendarily unstoppable lion. Sergei sees the beast first, but rather than shoot, he locks eyes with the jungle cat out of what we assume to be mutual respect. But when Nikolai fires his rifle, the spooked lion mauls Sergei.
Lucky for the near-dead young man, he’s not far from a young woman named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova), who comes from a long line of tarot card–readers and potion brewers. (The constant repetition of the name “Calypso” during this flashback prompts one of the film’s many cavalcade of giggles.)
She pours a magical potion into Sergei’s mouth, and that elixir, plus a drop of lion drool that lands directly in an open wound, gives Sergei strength, a predator’s sense of smell, and parkour-like dexterity. (The slo-mo shot of the lion saliva gets repeated almost as many times as “Calypso.”)
Sergei has cut ties with Nikolai but tries remaining close with younger brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, once again playing the weaker sibling, just weeks after the release of Gladiator II); the latter becomes a nightclub pianist but never earns the respect of their father.
Dmitri also has an ear for impersonations, although this never pays off in the plot, and it mostly involves Hechinger lip-synching to the voice of Crowe or Tony Bennett; the dubbing technology at play has improved only marginally since James Coburn’s voice came out of Richard Benjamin’s mouth 50 years ago in The Last of Sheila.
Kraven now acts as a vigilante going after the bad guys — “Once you’re on his list, you can never get off” is spoken almost as many times as “Calypso” — and he inveigles a grown-up Calypso (DeBose), now an attorney, into his revenge schemes.
His current targets involve a strength-obsessed criminal who transforms into a thick-skinned mutant called Rhino (Alessandro Nivola); a reality-blurring guy known as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), whose main skill seems to be the ability to stand behind his foe suddenly; and a Turkish kidnapper (Murat Seven) who snatches Dmitri to get to Nikolai.
Kraven the Hunter hops from country to country to jazz up its by-the-numbers narrative, but it never bothers to explain how some characters can be in Ankara one minute and then London the next. Taylor-Johnson delivers what is now a trademark on-screen peevishness although, unlike his similarly aggrieved character in Nosferatu, he occasionally doffs his shirt to reveal mandatory superhero abs. Most of the other players wildly overplay or underplay, showing a general sense of artists who know they are contractually obligated to remain aboard a sinking ship.
Sony has announced that this is the last of the “Spider-Man without Spider-Man” movies, an ill-begotten franchise that has reached the highs of the better Venom films and the lows of Morbius.
Kraven the Hunter lands alongside this year’s Madame Web in the pantheon of silly superhero sagas that wound up entertaining despite themselves; they don’t work as genre pieces, but the results are at least rollicking and often hilarious, no matter what their creators might have intended. So at least there’s that.
