Almost exactly a year ago, I got to review Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. That film ended up in the truly unenviable position of a de-facto end of a cinematic universe, well after the reboot’s announcement. It was a troubled production regardless, with reshoots and release date pushes aplenty before it finally bowed. But at least, in theory, it could have been a success. A sequel to a billion-dollar smash with a bankable star and a proven director of popcorn fare. It didn’t do well, nor was it particularly good. Sony’s Kraven the Hunter finds itself in a similar spot, except with none of the success or the goodwill that Aquaman had.
Just a day before the embargo lifted for the review of Kraven—indeed, the day of the media screening—a report stated that the movie would be the de-facto end of Sony’s, let’s face it, ill-judged Sony Spider-Man Universe, a universe that, due to a deal with Marvel Studios, meant the current and super popular Spidey Tom Holland could not appear outside of the MCU. The SSU has been a laughing stock, let’s face it. Every attempt without Venom in the title to make a villain-focused shared universe was less successful and more inept than the last. I find Kraven the Hunter interesting in this way. It certainly isn’t good, but showed the most potential for what this Spidey-free Spider-Man universe could have been.
So what’s the movie about? Well, it’s a Sony origin movie, so it takes a while to get there. As teens, Sergei and Dmitri Kravinoff leave their expensive New York private school to go live with their Russian gangster father Nikolai (Russell Crowe). Nikolai is a toxic piece of crap who chooses to take the boys on lavish African hunting expeditions as a way to prove that killing “lesser” creatures is fine. During the trip, a big ol’ lion attacks Sergei and he’s super dead. However, due to the deus-ex-machina path-crossing of a young girl named Calypso, he returns to health. See, her grandma is some kind of shaman and gives Calypso a serum that restores life, yadda yadda.
The long and short of it is that Sergei now has animal powers. This is mostly the ability to climb up things, unfathomable strength, seeing great distances, smelling people, etc. Sixteen years later, a grown up Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is knee-deep in his one-man crusade to kill poachers, drug dealers, and any sort of criminal. Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) remained with Nikolai, the shunned weaker son, but with the ability to mimic anyone. Another gangster, the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), wants Nikolai’s empire for himself. He also wants to kill this so-called Kraven the Hunter. He hires an assassin called the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) to do it. Meanwhile, Kraven catches up with an adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose) for help or whatever.
That is a very, very condensed version of the plot, and even that leaves out plenty. One of Kraven‘s main issues is that it has tons of plot but almost no story. We never really get to understand why and how Kraven went from protector of animals to murderer of criminals. Nor do we understand how he’s able to travel the globe in an, apparently, chartered military airplane. The plane’s pilot has a voice and a back of a head, but she’s never more than that. I have a strong suspicion this was a name actor who got cut out and revoiced at some point.
This illustrates the other enormous aspect that makes the movie unsuccessful: it’s barely coherent on a filmmaking basis. J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year) is a fine director generally. The action sequences in Kraven are in general pretty fun, if a bit repetitive. Sergei rarely changes up tactic as he bloodily annihilates hordes of goons. But as with all of these SSU movies, whatever issues the studio deemed the initial cut had, are subject to endless reshoots and offscreen ADR to somehow massage the movie into something they deem palatable.
The moment-to-moment editing suffers greatly. Out of nowhere, in the middle of a dialogue scene, we’ll get a shot of Taylor-Johnson or DeBose, clearly 18 months later with noticeably different hair, saying some line only to cut back to the original scene. The scene-to-scene editing suffers too, because with few exceptions, each new scene seems totally unrelated to the one previous. The effect is numbing. We keep watching people saying and doing things in a particular order only for our brains to try to fill in why we’re watching them in this specific order.
On their own, the individual scenes are fine. If you remove the clear reshoots, the scenes progress whatever is happening. The stakes just never seem to rise on a personal level, the characters never grow. If anything, the more the movie goes along, it only serves to make us more confused. Calypso is the biggest victim of whatever post-production horse pucky Sony mandated. She’s apparently a lawyer in London, but also has a weird past we don’t know anything about. She also has several added-later scenes of “F words” just to help bump the rating up… as though it being PG-13 was the problem.
And look, there’s obviously loads wrong with the movie on a technical level, but it probably didn’t help that the performances are all over the map. Taylor-Johnson is doing his usual facial expression acting coupled with what I like to call “Buff Guy Walk.” You’ve probably seen it. He moves his shoulders inorganically with every stride to accentuate his beefy arms. It happens in movies a lot. Crowe could literally give his performance in his sleep. Abbott seems so absurdly out of place in a comic book movie, especially as a weird hypnotic assassin.
But the creme of the crop, the performance that has the biggest potential to live in internet infamy is Nivola’s as the Rhino. Through his not-quite-Russian accent, he plays the character as a quiet psychopath and I feel like every single line delivery is a new kind of WTF. At one point he lets out what I can only describe as a prolonged bleat to show displeasure. It’s so weird.
Ultimately, as if you needed this fine a point, Kraven the Hunter doesn’t work. But, and here’s the key: it could have worked. Of any of the SSU movies to this point, Kraven seems to have nearly hit on what a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man could have been. It utilizes multiple Spider-Man rogues and places them in the same world and makes it reasonable they’d interact. At no point does it tip its hand toward the possibility that Spider-Man could show up and as a result the audience doesn’t spend the whole movie thinking about the lack of Spider-Man. If The Penguin is any indication, Sony could have made a movie about Tombstone in a gang war with Hammerhead and it could work.
Kraven the Hunter is yet another ignominious end for a cinematic universe that never even had one good movie to hang its hat on. The first Venom was at least fun. Kraven isn’t particularly fun, nor does it ever cross into that Morbius or Madame Web territory of so-bad-it’s-genius. It’s a whatever movie that won’t make any money and will exist merely as a footnote in superhero cinema until Sony can figure out the next way it can squeeze some money out of film rights.
Kraven the Hunter hits theaters on December 13.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.