‘Kraven the Hunter’ Review

Stars: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott, Levi Miller | Written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway | Directed by J.C. Chandor

A beefed-up Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars in this superhero action thriller, the sixth and reportedly final entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), following Morbius, Madame Web and the three Venom movies. As such, it’s not without its moments, but the action is largely generic and the exact nature of Kraven’s anti-hero status muddies the water a little bit.

Directed by J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost), Kraven the Hunter starts well, with Kraven (Taylor-Johnson) infiltrating a Russian prison and then violently murdering a notorious gang boss by stabbing him in the neck with a sharp tooth from his own sabre tooth tiger rug. One swift prison break later – with Kraven displaying heightened abilities, including some familiar wall-crawling – and we’re off into flashback territory, with a young Kraven (Levi Miller) gaining powers via an African potion, after surviving a vicious lion attack while on a hunting trip with his powerful Russian mobster father Nikolai (Russell Crowe, sporting a deliciously thick accent).

Back in the present day, Kraven is now a self-styled “hunter”, taking out powerful criminals and working alongside connected lawyer Calypso (Ariana DeBose), the woman who gave him the potion in the first place, 16 years earlier. Nikolai, meanwhile, is still a powerful crime boss, but when power-enhanced supercriminal The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) kidnaps Kraven’s beloved brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) and Nikolai refuses the ransom demands, Kraven sets out to rescue him.

The performances are something of a mixed bag. Nivola is clearly enjoying himself, and he makes The Rhino a much more interesting character than he’s ever been in the comics, and Hechinger is good value as Dmitri (he has a talent for mimicry that may be important for later), while Crowe steals pretty much every scene he’s in, somehow managing to stay on the right side of camp, despite his borscht-thick accent.

However, though Taylor-Johnson has the looks and the physicality, his characterisation is a little on the bland side, and his generic American accent choice doesn’t do him any favours. Similarly, DeBose is saddled with a criminally dull role – there’s clearly meant to be sexual tension between Kraven and Calypso (they are lovers-slash-allies in the comics), but that fails to materialise here, and there’s precious little else for her to do.

The biggest problem is Kraven himself. As with the rest of the Sony Spider-Man Universe protagonists, his character is defined by his relationship to Spider-Man, so without the wall-crawler web-slinging about, it’s difficult to care about him all that much. On top of that, his anti-hero status is decidedly shady at best – he might have a code (only kills those who deserve it, etc), but he’s still a violent and arguably vicious murderer, so positioning him as the straight-up hero of a superhero movie seems a little bit perverse. At least Venom had the alien symbiote as an excuse.

The action sequences are fairly decent (at least compared to Morbius), but they are also generic and no thought has been given to Kraven’s jungle powers beyond enhanced strength, speed and agility and what appears to be…animal telescopic vision? They are also hampered by some bog-standard CGI, the kind of visual effects where you can see the computer at work.

In fairness, the whole thing remains watchable throughout and there are a handful of decent moments, as well as some satisfying nods for die-hard Spider-Man fans, not that the mention of a certain scientist is likely to go anywhere if this is indeed the final film in the SSU.

In short, Kraven the Hunter is marginally better than expected, but it’s also generic and forgettable, and there’s nothing about Kraven, either character-wise or performance-wise, that would really merit a second outing. Put him in a Spider-Man movie though, and then we’ll talk.

** 2/5

Kraven the Hunter is in cinemas now.