Main cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Sergei Kravinoff/Kraven), Ariana DeBose (Calypso Ezili), Fred Hechinger (Dmitri Kravinoff/Chameleon), Alessandro Nivola (Aleksei Sytsevich/Rhino), Christopher Abbott (The Foreigner), and Russell Crowe (Nikolai Kravinoff)
Director: JC Chandor
Aaron Taylor-Johnson has one of the best tackles and cake houses in Hollywood, so it is a hate crime that Kraven the Hunter refuses to put his character in situations where that magnificent pee-pee and rear end are displayed for everyone’s wholesome viewing.
Having said that, this movie shocks me because it looks like it was filmed on a shoestring budget and put together by a behind-the-camera crew comprising amateurs. Scenes are filmed in a single plane, with no variation in angle or style, like it’s one of those cheap B-grade movies filmed by people with more enthusiasm than capacity.
In the comics, Kraven is a bombastic, pompous big game hunter that prefers to take down his prey with his bare hands. Weapons are for amateurs!
However, we can’t have a bad guy as a main character–despite the fact that Sony stated that this movie is part of a series about villains in the Spider-Man universe—so Kraven is now a gruff guy that just wants to protect nature from poachers and other meanies that want to despoil nature. What?
Our protector of nature gets his origin movie here. Sergei Kravinoff and his brother Dmitri are children of the drug kingpin Nikolai. When they were kids, Sergei gets injured by a lion while protecting Dmitri from the lion, and the lion then brings him to Calypso for healing… and somehow Sergei gets super animal powers from this encounter. Wait, what?
When Sergei realizes that Nikolai killed the lion for the insult on his kids, Sergei is all “HOW DARE YOU, SAVAGE ANIMALS THAT MAUL US ARE OUR FRIENDS!” and like every brat that embraces veganism, completely disowns his father and runs to his mother instead.
Cut to the future, when the adult Sergei is now a vigilante poacher-basher. He visits his brother for his birthday, only to be embroiled in a plot involving his brother getting kidnapped, a rhino-man wanting to take down Nikolai, the woo-woo Calypso now being a lawyer and being the true girl boss that saves Kraven because present day lazy WOOO ALL WOMEN ARE YOUR BOSSES writing, and ugh, the story is so bad. I have a feeling that using an AI program to write the script would result in a better story than the one here.
This is an R-rated movie, but I suppose the R stands for a rude word describing one’s lamentable mental state, as there is nothing here that feels gritty or graphic enough to warrant the R-rating hype.
Also, while poor Mr Taylor-Johnson does his best to save this movie without getting naked, the rest of the cast members don’t bother to try as they likely know better than him that there is no point of this thing aside from paycheck. Russell Crowe certainly has embraced the paycheck principle here, to the point that any movie with his name in the credits is a red flag.
Meanwhile, there is nothing memorable about this movie, not even in a so bad it’s good way. It’s just a dull, lifeless slough that feels far longer than its runtime of slightly over two hours due to the generally lifeless acting, drab cinematography, sluggish pacing, and a trope-heavy, uninspired script that offers little surprises or anything that is remotely interesting. It’s so bland and dead that I can’t even muster any negative feeling for it. Not loathing, not disgust, not horror, just… extreme apathy.
Seriously, this movie has nothing going for it.
