Cinematic universes come and go like a fad. Zack Snyder’s DCEU carcass went through peaks until it died with a whimper, Universal’s Dark Universe couldn’t survive beyond The Mummy (2017), and Disney’s MCU isn’t immune to audience fatigue. Now, Sony’s non-Spider-Man cinematic universe seems to be done after six films, with J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter (2024) as the final entry in a franchise that was ill-conceived from the beginning.
“Movies solely focused on Spider-Man’s villains (without Spider-Man):” Only an arrogant studio hellbent on never selling the rights to its sole superhero cash cow would come up with such an ill-fated concept.
Perhaps there’s an admirability to witnessing disastrous vehicles like Madame Web (2024) and the Venom trilogy (2018-2024) that stray from the quality-control, binary projects that must adhere to the proper MCU timeline. Sadly, it doesn’t make the experience of watching these calamitous projects play out in real time.
Kraven is no different. The R-rated bloody violence (a first for Sony) can emphasize Kraven’s actions as a sort of anti-hero figure. Still, it doesn’t make the poor plotting and cringe-inducing dialogue tolerable to sit through. No shade to Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s physique (which the film makes every effort to showcase), but there’s only enough eye candy to distract from the ridiculous narrative and awkward performances before you feel the film straining for any semblance of coherence.
Coherence is something you ultimately let go of as a viewer, as the film traces the roots of a young Kraven (aka Sergei Kravinoff) living with his crime-lord and safari-hunting father, Nikolai (Russel Crowe), and his half-brother, Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) in North Ghana. During a hunting expedition, Sergei is attacked by a lion. He nearly dies until a young girl named Calypso (Ariana DeBose) saves his life with a vial of magical serum her grandmother gave her, mixing Sergei’s blood with the lion’s. Like I said, you must let go of coherence in these movies to get on their wavelength.
This experience changes Sergei, as he becomes more animalistic and develops superhuman strength and agile abilities to hunt like an animal. Rejecting his father’s gangster empire, he goes to live off the grid, becoming a protector against poachers.
After Dimitri is kidnapped by Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a rival crime lord who goes by the name The Rhino, Kraven enlists help from Calypso to track his brother down.
Bringing on board an acclaimed filmmaker like Chandor clouded my expectations of what to expect with Kraven since his past filmography has delivered exciting, complex, exhilarating dramas where barely any action happens. In Chandor’s directorial debut Margin Call (2011), a board room meeting between Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey rivals anything from Sony’s six-film experiment. Kraven feels like a studio and a brand pummeling Chandor’s sensibilities, as no relationship or scenes of conversation feel anything but tedious and monotonous.
There’s been a general lethargic construction around Sony’s non-Spider-Man films, as they must introduce backstories and dynamics, ruining the momentous energy that keeps them from being engaging. While Chandor sprinkles in bloody carnage and fast-paced action sequences, they don’t lend themselves to being anything more than distractions from the tiring plot. The action often feels mechanical without any stylization to fit the character of Kraven. There’s only so much slicing and dicing of nameless henchmen you can take before it becomes repetitive.
The Venom films would’ve greatly benefited from Kraven’s willingness to be gleefully violent, which would fit an alien symbiote munching people to death. Here, the sequences lack the weight and tangibility involved in superpowered characters punching each other due to the cheap and rubbery-looking CGI. The animals Kraven protects appear fake, and Kraven leaping off buildings and fighting a half-rhino/man creature looks cartoonish.
Outside of Johnson’s physicality, he tries his best with a character lacking an emotional throughline tied to his underdeveloped relationship with his father. The film drudges up a thematic point of differences in masculinity in how Crowe (and his terrible Russian accent) portrays toxic masculinity that infects both sons. Kraven opts to escape his authority, leaving Dimitri the natural successor of his father’s empire. Scenes involved with Kraven and his brother are so few that their relationship—to which the narrative is tied— and any small bits of chemistry Johnson and Hechinger share feel sparse.
The worst of these scenes involve any dialogue uttered by Debose, who, after having so little to do in Argylle (2024) earlier in the year, finds herself doing even worse with more screen time. Her character integration and relationship with Kraven are thinly written and poorly delivered, often utilizing poor ADR (not as egregious as Madame Web) that paints this superficial dynamic as conjured out of thin air.
Nivola comes the closest to not taking the film seriously, which leads to some (unintentional) bits of humor involving him making (I assume) rhino snarls and making faces…because he’s part rhino. No actor goes unscathed by this script, a compilation of different scraps and parts of the comic-book genre.
This year has been a circling of the drain for comic book films. Madame Web seemed like an inevitable disaster akin to the iceberg in Titanic (1997); Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2024) was a ridiculous ending to a non-serious trilogy of preposterous films disguised as buddy comedies; Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) aimed to lash out at fans of the original movie and ostracize anyone who likes comic books, films, and Lady Gaga; Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) made a billion dollars but was a self-aggrandizing, cynically-made film that whored out peoples’ nostalgia of twenty years worth of comic-book movie lore.
Kraven the Hunter is banal. It’s a tired grasp of breath from a dying franchise forced into existence by a studio wringing the Spider-Man brand like a damp rag. The film isn’t the worst way to cap off six years of studio confusion, brand bewilderment, and inconsistent trajectories. Still, it feels fitting for a franchise that felt like a side-project to end like most side-projects have ever ended: no acknowledgment or recognition, just apathy, and a shoulder shrug.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Image Courtesy of Variety Via Sony Pictures Releasing