And so, almost exactly one year after the Snyderverse/DCEU died an un-mourned death with Aquaman The Lost Kingdom, here finishes another misbegotten cinematic superhero universe. After just six films (three being Venoms) across six years, most received hilariously badly, the Sony ‘Spiderman-without-Spiderman’ experiment ends with Kraven the Hunter, and the series died as it lived – by making the worst movie of 2005 and somehow transporting it into 2024. An origin story that just feels like an embarrassing obligation for all involved, JC Chandor’s take on the Spider-Man villain gets nowhere near to either the goofy fun of the character’s earlier appearances or the dark, psychological grandeur of his best later stuff.
As was the case with the likes of Morbius and Madame Web (but somewhat escaped by Venom thanks to its winking goofiness and enjoyably silly Tom Hardy voices), one of the key problems with Kraven is that, without Spider-Man, there is just zero point to any of this. We get an origin story for Kraven the Hunter, aka Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and it’s meandering and generic as all hell. In the source material, he’s a cruel and amoral hunter, drawn to New York from Russia to hunt the most dangerous game – Spider-Man. Here, he’s the son of a Russian gangster (played by a heavily accented Russell Crowe) who, after an incident involving lion blood, gets superpowers and starts hunting down other Russian gangsters across the globe.
It’s impossible to care about any of this. Chandor and the writers seem uncomfortable with how silly Kraven is as a figure, and so they Surf Dracula everything about him. That comic book-y outfit he has on in the poster? Literally only appears in the final shot. His relationship with Spider-Man? His dead mum was scared of spiders. His villainy? Completely gone – he’s not even an anti-hero, instead an animal-loving vegetarian who exclusively hurts the worst people in the world.
The attempts to take this guy “seriously” are laughable. Kraven has one of the year’s worst scripts and a lot of its worst acting, from Taylor-Johnson’s completely charmless and bored lead performance to some of the most excruciatingly bad day-players I’ve seen in a film in *years*. Crowe is having some fun, but not enough, and I can’t imagine Alessandro Nivola, making some baffling choices as main villain The Rhino, is happy that this is seeing the light of day to spoil his 2024 slate after his turns in the new Almodovar and The Brutalist.
So what of the action, the unrestricted gore of which is Kraven‘s only real USP? Well, it’s bloody, but it’s also utterly unimaginative and shot and cut abysmally (the whole edit here is a disaster, entire character arcs disappearing to make room for an interminably over-extended opening flashback to Kraven’s childhood). There are points where Kraven borders on being so-bad-it’s-fun, but Chandor’s approach is so completely humourless means it’s mostly just so-bad-it’s-bad. Goodbye Sony Spider-Man Universe or whatever you were officially called, it was mostly horrible knowing you.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 