When children lose a parent, it’s important for the remaining parent to be there for the kids. To listen to their concerns, to let them know the world hasn’t ended etc. Well, when Russian crime lord Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) lost his wife, the chosen course of action was to take his two sons big game hunting to stalk and kill something.
Unsurprisingly, his favourite son Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is attacked by a lion, mauled and carried off into the wilderness. Luckily for him, this comes immediately after young African girl, Calypso (Ariana DeBose) is given a secret potion by her voodoo priestess grandmother. This formula passed through her family “will heal whoever drinks it in undreamed of ways”. Fates align, and Sergei‘s life is saved, but he becomes imbued with superhuman abilities, giving him amazing strength and agility.
Turning his back on his father’s lifestyle, Sergei flees to the wilderness to live off the land. An obvious future emerges… he will become the world’s greatest conservationist and hunter of humans! As ‘Kraven the Hunter‘, he is the apex predator of poachers and general evil doers. Legend amongst criminals say he’s got a list and he’s checking it twice, to find out who’s gonna pay the price! That’s right, it’s Kravin’ time!
Sony Pictures has had mixed results with their recent batch of Marvel Cinematic Universe adjacent superhero films based on characters connected to Spiderman but without actually featuring the superstar web crawler. From hits like ‘Venom’ to notorious flops like Madam Web or Morbius, they’ve been entertaining but often not for the planned reasons.
This trend continues with Kraven the Hunter, the long awaited film debut of one of Spiderman’s most formidable enemies. However, with Spiderman nowhere to be seen and a more audience friendly (while not child friendly) take on the character Kraven has trouble carrying a film with too many villains and too little story.
I’ve been a fan of Taylor-Johnson for years now and I’m glad to see he’s getting plenty of high profile work. As Kraven, he has the physicality down and there’s a certain animal like quality to his stalking movements throughout the film. The opening prison escape scene (released online in full as a teaser) shows the potential that this movie had.
Yet, I’ve never seen an anti-hero so intent on making himself sound cool with forced one liners. This awkwardness plagues all of the characters and like Kraven the character, takes no prisoners! It is a film suffering greatly from rewrites, reshoots, ADR (seemingly with CGI’d mouths to accommodate new words) and horrendous exposition. This bad dialogue is delivered poorly by actors who have proven themselves to be capable of much better.
I cringe to think of the Oscar winning Ariana DeBose at this film’s premiere thinking to herself “THAT was the take they went with?!”. Her character is poorly defined in the role which should be a love interest, yet there’s no attempt to paint her as one. Nor is there reason given as to why she as a law abiding adult would help Kraven in his violent rampage.
On the other side is Russell Crowe, simply hamming it up as Nikolai Kravinoff, a violent Russian gangster. There’s very little behind his dodgy accent, yet he’s still a joy to watch. I also enjoyed Alessandro Nivola playing Aleksei Sytsevich as the only villain this film needed, The Rhino. Nivola portrays the character like Borat if he was cast in “The Book of Mormon“. It’s the only time that the film’s hilariously stilted dialogue actually feels like it works.
The CGI is oddly more impressive on the wild animals than it is on the actual human beings and there’s absolutely zero mystery to the film’s plot. All of these rewrites and you can still predict how the film is going to end over an hour before it actually does.
Yet, despite all its faults, I can’t find myself hating Kraven the Hunter. It’s a cheesy, fun, globe-trotting adventure full of over the top action and laughs (even if many of the guffaws from my audience were unintentional from the filmmakers perspective). The heightened level of violence is exactly what the Venom trilogy felt like it was missing and it at least gives the film something to differentiate it amongst many other superhero films.
It may be a misstep in many ways, but only because in today’s market superhero films need to do something really special to be seen as great. Kraven the Hunter never achieves this and is in fact extremely clumsy in its execution.
However, Kraven the Hunter is still a hell of a lot of fun and I would recommend it for audiences willing to shed pretensions and accept that they’re just watching a silly comic book movie.