Some years and a few premature notices have passed since “Kraven the Hunter” was first announced as Sony’s next Spider-Man adjacent spinoff. The overstuffed and undercooked maxi-production now joins two other DOA Spidey satellite pics, “Madame Web” and “Venom: The Last Dance,” neither of which performed well enough to warrant this much self-serious exposition and ham-handed thesping.
Everybody in “Kraven the Hunter” is clearly trying, as director J.C. Chandor tried to establish in his heartfelt introduction to last night’s New York premiere. There’s still nothing on-screen that suggests a clear understanding of the characters or why their stories had to be told other than the usual mindless urge to mine every last scrap of Marvel Comics’ intellectual property. Everything feels simultaneously lifeless and desperate to please, from the computer-generated safari animals to the elaborate wire-work and four-letter swears, but nothing has the spark of antic joy that you might want from a comic book movie about a shredded Russian assassin who has daddy issues and also fights colorful villains with names like the Rhino and the Foreigner. Sometimes the movie’s committed, but aimless cast members tell jokes; nothing really sticks here.
“Kraven the Hunter” begins on a long icy road to jail. The prisoners are let off the bus for five minutes to relieve themselves. A guard waddles after our antihero, Sergei “the Hunter” Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who makes his grand entrance while urinating. At least, it looks like Sergei’s peeing, even if the guard’s dialogue suggests that he’s actually looking around, hoping to escape.
Sergei won’t get far, we’re told, because there are (big, bland, computer-animated) wolves loping about. He meets and dispatches those wolves right after he breaks out of prison. Much like the legendary (but unaffiliated) Pumaman, Taylor-Johnson flies over rooftops and scales walls without grace or style. He takes his shirt off on a helicopter that flies him away to the next setup, then quips robotically to his getaway driver when she asks him how things went in jail. “How they always go,” Taylor-Johnson croaks. “Good for me, bad for them.”
You can’t stay mad at Taylor-Johnson for long, even if he does have the bum task of carrying a movie whilst delivering reams of articulate but unlovable dialogue like, “Hunting people down is sort of my thing.” Some super-powered villains, led by the heavily accented egomaniac Aleksei “the Rhino” Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and the squirrelly unnamed assassin the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), pursue Kravinoff. He doesn’t get far, nor does he appear to be in a hurry given his faith in his animal-style super-powers, which were gifted to him as a youth by his future girlfriend Calypso (Ariana DeBose) during a safari hunt with his overbearing big game hunter father Nikolai (Russell Crowe). Sergei also has a fawning brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who only pops up when Sergei’s story needs some stakes or a basic sense of urgency.
These characters usually tell us (at length) what they care about, followed by some monotonous, by-the-numbers computer-animated set pieces that show off everyone’s superpowers: the Foreigner can hypnotize and then gun down his opponents, Sytsevich has a weird medical condition that gives him rhino skin, Calypso has a voodoo-loving grandma, etc.
Who was this R-rated 127-minute-long slog made for? Obligatory quips, unusually long takes, joyless profanity, and unconvincing bloodletting don’t do much to set the tone, possibly because the rest of the movie isn’t sensibly designed for anyone but presold comic book movie fanboys. Nivola outshines the rest simply by committing to overblown character actor tics; Crowe also seems to understand his assignment. Both men seem to hail from a different movie than the one Taylor-Johnson is acting in. He stalks two armed heavies up a staircase, ducking behind them like Harpo Marx when they inevitably turn to check what’s over their shoulders (it’s Sergei). He then drops on all fours to assert dominance, like Sharon Stone in “Catwoman.” This is soon after Kraven bites off another heavy’s nose and then spits it out at another baddy in a hail of tacky-looking computer graphics. At least “Batman Returns” made a similarly jarring effect worth gasping at.
For better and (mostly) worse, “Kraven the Hunter” definitely feels like one of Sony’s Marvel movies. Given the otherwise numbing wealth of dramatic short-hand, you’ll spot and maybe even cling to eccentric grace notes and flourishes throughout. Hacky clichés and contrivances abound, making it harder to enjoy when characters say something so gaspingly silly that you have to wonder: wait, did the Foreigner just explain his nickname by saying, “Because I’m not from around?” “Kraven the Hunter” is not, in other words, as mediocre or watchable as the average entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, Sony’s latest Spidey yarn is a charmless stinker that’s only well-polished enough to make you resent the stench.
