Kraven The Hunter - Review 

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

IT’S hard to believe that Kraven The Hunter was directed by JC Chandor given the gulf in quality between this latest Sony superhero offering and the director’s previous films.

At his best, Chandor is capable of absolute classics such as Oscar Isaac crime drama A Most Violent Year, the Robert Redford star vehicle All Is Lost, astute financial drama Margin Call and thoughtful action-thriller Triple Frontier.

With Kraven, he’s working with another decent cast (led by Brit Aaron Taylor-Johnson) but conforms to the low quality template that marks all of Sony’s Marvel-based live action offerings outside of their Spider-Man collaborations with the MCU.

That is to say, Kraven is as badly plotted, lamely acted and poorly executed as the likes of Madame Web, Morbius and the Venom movies. At best, it’s entirely forgettable.

What’s more disappointing is that Kraven represents one of the more interesting Spider-Man villains, which should have offered a lot more room to play around with.

Instead, we get a hastily cobbled together origins story that positions Kraven as the hero - a loner who wants nothing more than to escape the reach of his tyrannical father (played by Russell Crowe, complete with hammy Russian accent), and who has placed bad men all over the world on his hunt and kill list.

Caught in between is Kraven’s brother, Dimitri (Fred Hechinger), the supposedly weaker sibling, as well as a woman named Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who holds the secret to Kraven’s acquired powers, and Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), a vengeful businessman who has his own reasons for wanting to kill both Kraven and his father.

Put together, this should have provided a decent amount of scope for an involving family drama, torn loyalties and an exploration of the morality of Kraven’s hunting, replete with suitably superhero style action.

But while there are hints at all of these, they are cursory at best; Chandor instead opting for R-rated violence and low quality effects over anything remotely challenging.

The biggest loser in all of this (apart from fans of the character or the genre) is Taylor-Johnson, who follows in Tom Hardy’s footsteps in becoming another talented British actor left to flounder in sub-par material. He brings athleticism and a suitably buff physique, but any attempts to bring either depth or nuance to his portrayal are smothered by a basic script and limited opportunity (at least Hardy was afforded the chance to go big with Venom and duly emerged with some credit).

Here, the lack of narrative logic even deprives Taylor-Johnson of any real direction given that the film singularly fails to establish Kraven as the credible villain he becomes, or any real reason for turning bad. Rather, his brother decides that his actions are no better than his ruthless father’s, while the arrival of a signature coat is also supposed to herald a shift in the character’s focus as, by donning said coat, audiences are expected to assume his transformation is complete.

Elsewhere, the likes of Nivola and Crowe are content to merely ham it up with dodgy accents or eccentricities (even though they play it seriously), while DeBose delivers her lines as if she is reading them straight off the page without any real conviction.

Indeed, another of the film’s many failings is its failure to embrace its own absurdity (something the Venom movies absolutely did), playing things straight when - given the nature of the script - there was room for some self-awareness.

But even though there’s a car crash quality to seeing just how bad things get, Kraven fails to redeem itself in a ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of way because it is - ultimately - so badly written, poorly directed and badly acted.

Kraven fans (like Morbius and Venom ones before them) are left to wonder what could have been had Sony relinquished its grip on these characters and handed them over to the MCU, who may well have known how to use and incorporate them better - and actually pitting them against Spider-Man.

Certificate: 15

Running time: 2hrs 7mins