Well, it would appear that Sony finally wised up and realized no one really wanted to see their “Spider-Man Universe Without Spider-Man” movies. It maybe should have gone the way of Universal’s Dark Universe sooner, but it stuck around for a while as Sony combed through the Spider-Man characters looking for any character that could use as a lead to a new movie, a move that gave the likes of Venom, Mobius, and Madame Web their own movies. Sure, Venom got some sequels, but the others? Here’s the thing: while none of these movies were any better than mediocre, they also were never all that boring. They were weird more often than not. Anyway, the last movie came out while I was on a brief vacation with the Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter somehow getting a movie of his own.
As for why I went to see Kraven as my first trip to the movies after my vacation, that was more about the fact that it was the first to have a convenient showtime for me. It could have been all kinds of movies, but this one was just playing at a good time for me to go see it.
Sergei Kravinoff, AKA Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has some vaguely-defined animal powers, including physical strength, agility, sharpened senses, and whatever else he needs to have when the situation demands it. He gained those powers after he was attacked by a lion on a safari and a random teenage girl showed up to give him a mystery formula that her tarot-card using grandma gave her that mixed his blood with the lions. As an adult, Kraven passes in an out of his mimic half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger)’s life while not really approving of his mob boss/big game hunter father Nikolai (Russell Crowe doing a Boris Badenov accent) when he isn’t using those powers, again vaguely defined, to hunt down the worst people around–plus the occasional well-armed poacher–and kill them as the mysterious “Hunter.”
However, there’s a new threat on the horizon as another Russian criminal, Aleksei “the Rhino” Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), has learned who the mysterious Hunter is. Aleksei has agents of his own, including the mysterious teleporter “the Foreigner” (Christopher Abbott), and while Rhino may not be able to bring in Kraven himself, he knows there are other targets like Dmitri or even that random teenage girl now a random lawyer named Calypso (Ariana DeBose). It will be up to the Hunter to deal with being the Hunted while Hunting his own Hunters. Or something. It makes more sense when you watch the movie, but hardly anyone apparently has. Maybe if Spider-Man was actually involved…
So, here’s the thing: this is a weird movie that flips back and forth between the insane, like how Kraven gained his powers, to the dull and mundane that is the cliched overall plot. It’s a movie that hits familiar beats by then tosses in a shot that looks like a lion’s eye view of moving through tall grass, something that maybe is only missing the hand of a gladiator to look like one of Crowe’s best-known movies. Performances range from DeBose’s wooden blandness to Crowe’s scenery-chewing to Nivola’s own soft-spoken, eccentric work. As I said above, I don’t think any of these movies have been boring, but they have all been weird in their own way, with meme-worthy awkward lines, poorly-cast lead actors, and screwy special effects, and that’s just Madame Web. Kraven the Hunter doesn’t exactly break any of these trends. This is not a good movie.
But then there’s Taylor-Johnson, and I think he might actually be trying here. He walks around with a pace that suggests a caged predator, gives even his most-cliched lines a serious line-reading, and doesn’t look all that silly playing a very silly character. He’s got a nice charm, such that when he’s told he’s just like his criminal father, it doesn’t feel right. He may actually have been the best cast lead actor in any of Sony’s Spider-Man free live action superhero movies, and if any of them get asked to play the character for the MCU somehow, I would rather see Taylor-Johnson in a better-written movie than Tom Hardy as Hardy seemed to be just be goofing around in the Venom movies. It’s not enough to make for a good movie, but it does make for one last oddity in one last no-better-than-mediocre Sony superhero movie.
Grade: C-
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