Kraven the Hunter (2024, dir. J.C. Chandor)

by Jack Martin | Dec 14, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 127 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 13 December 2024

WHO’S IN KRAVEN THE HUNTER?

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Russell Crowe, Murat Seven, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Levi Miller, Billy Barratt, Diaana Babnicova

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

J.C. Chandor (director), Matt Holloway, Art Marcum and Richard Wenk (writers), Avi Arad, David B. Householter and Matt Tolmach (producers), Evgueni Galperine, Sacha Galperine and Benjamin Wallfisch (composers), Ben Davis (cinematographer), Craig Wood (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A big-game hunter (Taylor-Johnson) sets out for brutal vengeance…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON KRAVEN THE HUNTER?

It’s amazing that Sony has now made two attempts to build a cinematic universe centred around Spider-Man, and both times they’re utterly failed. After the expanded world that the studio spent the entirety of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 setting up never came to fruition, the studio’s pivot towards solo outings for some of the web-slinger’s most notable foes and allies has arguably been an even greater backfire. Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, as it is officially known, has been a hot mess of projects ranging from loud and obnoxious (the Venom trilogy) to WTF levels of so-bad-it’s-good (Madame Web) to just plain dull (Morbius), at no point feeling like it’s leading to anything on the same level as the much more successful MCU, where Spider-Man himself has spent far more time in than his own designated universe.

With conflicting reports that the SSMU is set to either end entirely or be given a total overhaul going forward, that leaves Kraven the Hunter in perhaps the most awkward position of the lot. Much like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, director J.C. Chandor’s film is clearly structured to lead into numerous unexplored corners of this universe, overstuffing itself with characters being groomed for their own spin-offs down the line. But it is much less likely to happen here, not just because of those reports regarding the SSMU’s future, but also because Kraven the Hunter is pretty bad, to where any vision of a follow-up would be considered utterly fanciful.

The film opens with the titular Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) sneaking his way into a snowy Russian prison to locate and kill a gangster who happens to be on his list of people to hunt, using his extraordinary animal-like powers in order to do so. Before you can ask all the burning questions you may have in your head, we cut back to 16 years earlier, when a young Kraven – aka Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller) – and his younger brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt) are informed by their neck-tied mobster father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) that their mother’s just committed suicide, which can only mean one thing: hunting trip!

It is on this trip that Sergei is mauled by a lion, and with the help of a mysterious elixir carried by a young girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) he is nursed back to life, with heightened senses that make his eyes glow gold for some reason. As an adult, Sergei – now having adopted the unexplained moniker of Kraven the Hunter – tracks down Calypso (now played by Ariana DeBose) to help him locate the numerous people he has on his list. Why does he suddenly have a list of people to kill? Why isn’t his father, clearly a wrong’un, on that list? Why does rival gangster Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) need to form alliances with gangsters to take down his enemies when he can literally transform into a bleedin’ rhino at any point and do the job himself? Why? Why? Why? So much of Kraven the Hunter is you just asking yourself that over and over.

Nothing about this movie makes sense, because the script constantly fails to establish the most basic of narrative cohesion, whether it’s simple character motivations or viable plot beats. Instead, the film relies on hefty exposition dumps, none of which are made interesting enough to follow along with, and mindless action set-pieces featuring some truly wonky CGI and incomprehensible editing that makes it hard to even tell what’s happening a lot of the time. You can tell that much of it was added in reshoots (which would partly explain why the film was delayed for almost two years from its original January 2023 release date) because some sequences feel out of place and even disrupt the flow of the drama, with one particular action-heavy scene set in a nightclub coming before a much more tender moment involving some of the same characters, leading one to think that this was their original reintroduction before that earlier scene was put in to add more action for already-bored audience members.

It still wouldn’t have solved many of the film’s other glaring problems, including unmotivated performances by actors (some of whom have Oscars to their name) that feel as though they are internally counting down the minutes until they can move on to better gigs, and ADR work so bad that it almost makes one want to apologise to Madame Web for its own laughably distracting audio. At least in that film, it was mainly just one character who sounded like the lead character in a kung-fu movie; in Kraven the Hunter, every other character sounds like they’ve been recorded over relentlessly, to where it rarely sounds like those are the words coming out of these actors’ mouths. There are multiple scenes where lead characters are shot from far away, so that we never see their lips move, and the words we hear coming out of them have the crisp and clear quality you’d get from a close-up microphone, otherwise unnatural for the environment they’re actually in. It even gets to a point where the re-recorded dialogue makes the performances worse, with line-readings that sound as though they just read the script moments before cameras started rolling.

There’s no getting around it: Kraven the Hunter is, in true SSMU fashion, an utter mess of a film. It isn’t even to where you could call it “so-bad-it’s-good”, because it’s just too boring to laugh consistently at like you could with the likes of Madame Web or Morbius, leaving very little genuine entertainment to nibble at here. If this is indeed the end of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, it’s probably for the best.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Kraven the Hunter is an abysmal entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe that carries many of the franchise’s worst qualities, from incomprehensible CGI-coated action sequences to dreadful writing and performances to distractingly bad ADR work, but very little actual entertainment quality, intentional or otherwise.