Kraven the Hunter review: a suitably awful farewell to Sony’s Spider-Verse

There’s no post-credits scene in Kraven the Hunter. No cameo to offer, no future to tease, no Morbin’ time crossover to set up. Sit to the bitter end of this latest and possibly last installment in the franchise inelegantly (and quite misleadingly!) dubbed Sony’s Spider-Man Universe and you’ll be greeted with little more than a long list of special effects artists. They say failure is an orphan, but this one has hundreds of fathers, spread across multiple continents and companies, all presumably faced with the same unreasonable deadlines. Further into the crawl of the credits, we’re informed that no animals were harmed in the making of the movie. That we could guess. It would be impossible, after all, to mistake the shoddy CGI jungle cats that periodically pounce into frame for real beasts.

Kraven comes from the panels of a Spider-Man comic, just like the other misfit toys from Sony’s island of them, aka Venom, Morbius, and the truly obscure Madame Web. He’s among the goofier adversaries from that superhero rogues’ gallery: a mythical Russian hunter magically blessed with the strength, speed, and predatory instincts of a lion. Kraven works just fine as a Spider-Man villain, but, of course, the version of the character we meet in this movie will never face off against Spider-Man. Pity, as they have a lot in common, including family baggage, powers acquired from an animal bite, and the habit of scrambling up walls.

For most of this dopey origin story, Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, which is unfortunate. Setting aside his lively turn in the supersized crime comedy Bullet Train, the guy is a charisma vacuum; he can be as flat and blank as the backing boards you’d slip into a plastic comic book sleeve. It was a bad joke, hearing him bandied about as a potential new James Bond. Of course, not even a star of Daniel Craig’s swagger could make this Tarzan wannabe, leaping around and blowing tiny darts at his prey, look as cool as the movie thinks he is. 

Nor could Sir. Laurence Olivier himself successfully deliver on the delusions of Shakespearean grandeur in the script by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway. Early on, they deploy a long, momentum-killing flashback to Kraven’s youth as Sergei, favored prep-school son of a macho-patriarchal, safari-loving Russian gangster played, pungently, by Russell Crowe. “There is an animal in each one of us,” he theatrically intones in his cartoon accent, and judging from Crowe’s performance, that animal is a ham. While the teenage boy survives a near-fatal mauling thanks to a vial of unclassified McGuffin Serum and disappears into the wild, his runt-of-the-litter brother, Dmitri, grows up to be a lounge singer with an uncanny knack for impersonation. This self-described chameleon (hint hint for those not up on their Marvel comics villain lore) is played by Gladiator II’s Fred Hechinger, who’s really cornering the market on milquetoast dweebs in big Hollywood movies.

Introduced to the main theme from The Hunt For Red October as he’s transported to a prison where a mark awaits (the one sequence in this slipshod affair that achieves some measure of idiot magnificence), Kraven spends much of the film cutting a bloody path through various goons and lowlifes. This is the first R-rated movie of Sony’s superhero universe, and that mainly amounts to a lot of video-game splatter, including a scene where our anti-hero bites off a poacher’s nose. There’s a nasty, direct-to-video-grade action movie lurking somewhere in Kraven the Hunter, but it’s crushed under the demands of a $100 million would-be blockbuster that won’t be: too much gimcrack effects work, too much setup for sequels never coming, too many characters fluent only in the language of backstory.

Where did that big budget go? Not to the spectacle, which — like that of Madame Web — evokes the choppy, garish indifference of early 2000s superhero fare like Elektra and Ghost Rider. Given 100 guesses, you might still fail to peg the man behind the camera as J.C. Chandor, though he’s proven to be a bit of a chameleon himself, shape-shifting from the dialogue-heavy financial drama of Margin Call to the dialogue-less survival drama of All is Lost. With Kraven the Hunter, he miraculously transforms himself into … Mark Steven Johnson. Only the film’s sketchy gang war plotting betrays the mark of the director of A Most Violent Year. The movie he’s made this time lurches clumsily from one scene to the next, never finding its footing as either brutal genre piece or operatic melodrama about brothers caught in the long shadow of their father’s toxic masculinity.

The only pleasures Kraven the Hunter has to offer are faint, dumb, and guilty, and mostly supplied by an ensemble putting wildly varying amounts of effort into their underwritten paycheck roles. Alessandro Nivola seems to be having the most fun as the main villain, a grinning, resentful mercenary with the ability to transform himself into a rhino-like behemoth with armored skin. If his scenery-chewing overacting is in the right B-movie spirit of the material, Christopher Abbott goes downright comatose to play an assassin who can blip in for a kill with a ghostly quiet; in his turtleneck and shades, he’s like a bored fashion model who got lost on his way to the runway. Meanwhile, West Side Story’s Oscar-winning Ariana DeBose just seems generally lost as Calypso — a voodoo priestess in the comics, but more of a potential love interest here, though she has no chemistry with her co-star.

If the curtain is really closing on Sony’s alternate Marvel cinematic universe, Kraven the Hunter is a suitably unceremonious finale. It’s every bit as silly, chintzy, and unexciting as what came before it, though anyone expecting the true camp ineptitude of Madame Web may leave disappointed by its more run-of-the-mill crappiness. There are those who will tell you that these cut-rate superhero movies, these off-brand origin stories, are preferable to the spit-shined formula pictures Marvel proper is churning out across town. Those people are not your friends. They’ll feed you roadkill and expect you to be grateful it’s not a Big Mac.

Kraven the Hunter is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.