Aaron Taylor-Johnson sinks his claws into Kraven The Hunter – a Spider-Man-adjacent movie that is at its best when it forgets about comics. Our review:
Call it guilt by association: Kraven The Hunter is the latest (and more than likely last) in a string of Spider-Man Parallel Adventure Movies (or SPAM) that haven’t exactly gone down well with audiences. The Venom trilogy may have found an affectionate following thanks to its ramshackle charm and a game central performance from Tom Hardy, but the same can’t be said for the frankly calamitous Morbius or Madame Web.
It’s little wonder, then, that Kraven The Hunter seemed doomed long before it even came out, with word of delays and reshoots leading to widespread assumptions that Sony might have another disjointed oddity like Madame Web on its hands. The result is certainly odd, and there are distinct signs here and there of late changes, but it’s far from the disaster some had predicted or even morbidly hoped for.
A conspicuously buff Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the titular Kraven – who unlike the villain of the comic books hunts career criminals rather than animals. But like his comic book counterpart, he still has a zoological connection; when he was a youth, and better known as Sergei Kravinoff, he was involved in a fatal lion attack while out hunting in Ghana. Not that he was ever into shooting defenceless creatures; rather, he and his younger brother, Dmitri (played by Fred Hechinger as a grownup) were forced into going on safari by their sociopathic father, the Russian billionaire Nikolai (Russell Crowe).
Having been revived by a mystical potion administered by a young woman named Calypso (Ariana DeBose), Kraven’s wounds heal and he vows to take out evil crime lords like his father. Back in the present, his brother Dmitri’s now a London club owner who specialises in impersonating famous singers like Tony Bennett (a tease at his supervillain persona, Chameleon), while a new crime boss, Aleksei ‘Rhino’ Systsevich (Alessandro Nivola) is on the ascendancy.
JC Chandor is best known as the director of taut dramas and thrillers such as Margin Call, All Is Lost and A Most Violent Year, and Kraven The Hunter, in its strongest moments, is essentially a heightened gangster film. Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven channels his hatred towards his father into tracking and slaughtering villains just like him, while Nikolai belittles and castigates his younger son, Dmitri, for being less of an alpha male than his elder sibling. The moments between the three, although goofy at the best of times, are still effective; Chandor’s too good a director of actors, and his stars too talented, for their scenes together not to have some sort of dramatic charge going on.
Similarly, Alessandro Nivola makes for a likeably off-the-wall villain; with a strange chemical administered into his torso via a tube connected to a little black backpack, he’s fascinating purely on a visual level. Thanks to Nivola – a hugely underrated character actor who’s previously shone in such films as Face/Off and The Art Of Self-Defense – he’s also an unpredictable, grinning ball of nervous energy.
There are also one or two decent, often quite bloody action set-pieces – the standout being an extended chase across London, in which Taylor-Johnson literally tears trunks out of moving, bullet-proofed SUVs. Had Kraven The Hunter simply been a crime thriller with one or two superhero elements, it could have been on a par – if not better – than those broadly-liked Venom films. But Kraven The Hunter is also a comic book flick that, possibly thanks to the insistence of Sony executives, feels duty bound to throw in great stampedes of unconvincing CGI animals, a truly forgettable secondary villain played by Christopher Abbott (a hypnotist and hitman simply called the Foreigner), and other sequences that feel tacked on after the fact.
Podcast | In conversation with writer/director JC Chandor
An action moment featuring DeBose feels notably out of place, as does a CGI slugfest that could have come from the third act of any other Marvel movie from the last quarter of a century. What might once have been a streamlined, exciting action yarn therefore falls into the same trap of numerous other films of its type: it’s too overstuffed with characters, and too jarringly all-over-the-place to hold itself together. And did we really need yet another lengthy origin story?
The clash of styles is even more unfortunate because there’s a sly, subversive undercurrent tucked away in here, perhaps dreamed up by screenwriter Richard Wenk or Chandor himself. Stripped down to his essentials, the movie suggests, Kraven is hardly better than the monsters he hunts. This, like so many other good ideas in Chandor’s film, will almost certainly be overlooked by cinema-goers who’ve grown suspicious of Sony’s ill-fated franchise.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that there’s an alternate version of Kraven The Hunter locked in a vault somewhere – essentially a larger-then-life, pop art take on The Long Good Friday.
Sony: release the Chandor Cut!
Kraven The Hunter is showing in UK cinemas now.
