Jonah Naplan   December 23, 2024

“Kraven the Hunter” is not nearly as bad as some have made it out to be. It’s definitely better than the other TWO “Spider-Man-Villain-Verse” movies released this year, being the dumpster fires of “Madame Web” and “Venom: The Last Dance,” and, surprisingly, at a full 127 minutes, I didn’t mind that I was watching it that much. Still, it isn’t very good. Director J.C. Chandor’s film gets tripped up by its own convictions and a litany of obvious reshoots that are the byproduct of years of theatrical delays. Star Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries his best, as he always does, delivering a campy performance that’s completely self-aware of the type of movie this is. But others, especially Russell Crowe and Alessandro Nivola, seem to be acting in a totally different movie, one with some modicum of seriousness that this script by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Richard Wenk doesn’t welcome. It’s a brash, modestly entertaining, but overall forgettable picture with a roar no louder than a meow.

The film opens with Sergei Kravinoff, otherwise known as “Kraven” (Johnson), escaping imprisonment and slaughtering the warden before marching into a vicious storm and boarding a getaway plane. He likes the alias “The Hunter,” and his agenda as a Russian assassin who kills bad people for a living seems to perfectly match his impossibly muscular and tough-guy demeanor. The movie spends a generous amount of time in flashback, demonstrating how these qualities came to be. After his mother committed suicide, a young Sergei (Levi Miller) and his brother Dmitri (played by Billy Barratt as a boy and Fred Hechinger as a grown-up) went on a hunting trip to the African plains with their harsh father Nikolai (Crowe), who showed little mercy after Sergei narrowly survived a deadly lion attack. Ultimately, it was the (magical powers?) of a young girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova who grows up to become Ariana DeBose) that saved him and, as a result, he, too, received animalistic abilities that allow him to super-sonically locate far away enemies and scale walls and buildings without breaking a sweat. It’s all extravagantly silly.

Silly, too, are this film’s offerings of villainy. The principal bad guy is Aleksei Sytsevich or “The Rhino” (Nivola)—a character only briefly teased in Marc Webb’s “Amazing Spider-Man” movies—who was wronged by Sergei’s father on the same hunting trip many decades ago and who has the ability to warp his skin into that of a … well, you know. When the full transformation is finally put on display in the final battle you might even laugh out loud. He’s teamed with “The Foreigner” (Christopher Abbott), a hysterically goofy clairvoyant who hypnotizes and then kills his company in gory ways. Abbott proves early on that he holds the gift of keeping our attention merely by popping a silly line of dialogue that he knows is stupid just as well as we do, creating a sort of inside joke between him and the audience.

“Kraven the Hunter” rarely plays anything with a straight face. The few places it drops “the bit,” such as it is, are all the scenes with Crowe, who seems to believe that this big-budget comic book movie dumped into theaters with little marketing just before Christmas is a terse opportunity to flex his Oscar-winning chops, and all of Nivola’s big moments which reek of expositional sludge and narrative panhandling. Other than that, the movie knows exactly what it is, perhaps consciously aware that at this dire point, after endless reshoots and audio doctoring, the best plan of action is to throw up its hands and say what the heck. Certain scenes feel curiously redolent of screwball cartoons, where characters could be beaten and bashed to no end and come out just fine on the other side. It has the mystical energy of a parody of a comic book movie rather than a real one.

To that point, the creators are completely unafraid to make “Kraven the Hunter” as unforgivably violent as they want. I was caught off-guard by the near comical tonal imbalance of scenes that tend to veer more towards a PG-13 reading and then shift to a hard R. It seems perfectly comfortable in both categories, and never learns to stick with one, the most jarring aspect of a movie that you’ve otherwise seen many times before. This neglect of the production also results in some abhorrent CGI animals that up close can look as underdeveloped as poor video game graphics, pushing the industry two steps backwards from the spectacle of recent technological advances in films like “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Oppenheimer,” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” franchise.

All of that to say, I still give “Kraven the Hunter” extra credit because it does what comic book movies at their very core are always supposed to do but that they too frequently forget: it takes itself even less seriously than we care to take it. Its YOLO approach and bold, perhaps irrational swings render it more pleasant to sit through than almost all of the other comic book movie offerings from 2024. It’s not that it’s so good, it’s that we’re at such a devastating low and “Kraven the Hunter” is minorly elevated above it. Stan Lee would be rolling in his grave if only he knew.

Now playing in theaters.