KRAVEN THE HUNTER - Mark Reviews Movies

Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 13, 2024

No one who learns the identity of the mysterious "the Hunter" lives to reveal it. How, then, does some computer program analyzing some random security footage know to connect Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to both the Hunter and his top-secret nickname Kraven, which he definitely reveals only to those he's about to kill? One imagines it's because the makers of Kraven the Hunter assume the audience will be just like them and not think about it.

Here is yet another superhero/supervillain spin-off movie based on the line-up of comic-book characters associated with Spider-Man. It's about as unsuccessful in creating an intriguing character as the rest of the bunch.

In the comics, Kraven is part of the famous webslinger's rogues' gallery, but since mainstream movies have a difficult time letting a villain in comic-book story be an actual villain, the character is given a variety of redeeming qualities. He has a tenuous relationship with his Russian gangster father, because he doesn't like criminals. He has a moral code for whom he kills in grisly ways, punctuated by a lot of digital blood. He has his own cast of supervillains to battle, and yes, they're much worse than him, although director J.C. Chandor's movie does make Kraven into little more than a superhero with the motive and methods of a vigilante.

He's introduced being brought to a remote prison by Russian soldiers, and it's all part of his plan to assassinate a different crime lord. With his mission completed, he escapes, gets on a plane flown by an associate, and returns home to an animal sanctuary elsewhere in Russia.

There's not much to this character, either in terms of his abilities, which amount to super-strength and an inhuman level of agility, or his personality, which is dreadfully serious. Since this is the first time we're meeting him, though, screenwriters Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway include a lengthy origin story of his powers, which also serves as an origin story of his family, his soon-to-be partner in hunting down bad guys, and his main foe in the story—when the movie eventually gets back to it.

There's a strange philosophy to a good number of these superhero movies that seems to believe that more information is always better. In this case, we don't just see a young Sergei (played by Levi Miller) gain his superpowers by being given a magic potion, after nearly being killed in a lion attack. We also witness how that potion gets into the hands of the seemingly random girl, on safari with her parents, who just happens to find Sergei in the maw in the lion. The girl grows up to be Calypso (Ariana DeBose), another of Spider-Man's enemies from the comics, so we can add yet another to the number of origin stories this movie is juggling and rushing.

Anyway, Sergei leaves his domineering father Nikolai (Russell Crowe), travels to Russia, and begins a life of hunting down the worst of the worst criminals he can find. That reunites him with Calypso, who's living and working as prosecutor in London, and through a lot exposition that could be called haphazard at best and random at worst, it sets Aleksei (Alessandro Nivola, trying his best to add some flavor to the proceedings with his eccentric performance) on a mission to hunt down Kraven before the Hunter can hunt down him. By the way, Aleksei's alias is "the Rhino," so add him to the ever-increasing roster of super-powered characters—or ones soon to be so—in the overloaded cast.

There are so many pieces to this narrative—which also includes Kraven's younger brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), an impressionist of such talent that it's obvious this is also his origin story, and the enigmatic villain the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), who can hypnotize people in a flash—that one hopes some mindless action will show up eventually. The unconvincing visual effects of Kraven leaping up, across, and over assorted buildings, cars, and other things is a refreshing respite from the deluge of back story and plot. That's probably the best that can be said of the action sequences, though, because the occasional eruption of computer-generated blood isn't nearly enough to distract us from how chaotic but monotonous the staging of those scenes is.

Taylor-Johnson is somewhat an imposing presence as the character, although it looks as if half of the stunt work or more is a matter of visual effects. With so much else going on and being set up and distracting from the protagonist, Kraven the Hunter and its anti-hero are just additional duds to include with the others in this franchise of Spider-Man spin-offs.

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