‘Kraven the Hunter’ Just Assassinated the Superhero Genre

Following the path carved out by Venom, Kraven the Hunter, which hits theaters Dec. 13, provides an origin story for one of Spider-Man’s villains while simultaneously casting him as an anti-hero tasked with taking down an even worse Big Bad.

Why anyone would care about this evil character outside the context of a Spidey adventure, however, is a question that J.C. Chandor’s long-delayed film—which was shot nearly three years ago—doesn’t satisfyingly answer. A corny and turgid saga that should bring to a close Sony’s live-action “Spider-Verse,” if not the faltering genre as a whole, it’s an unspectacular affair that melds Marvel, Tarzan, and John Wick to depressing and forgettable ends.

Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is the favorite son of drug-dealing gangster Nikolai (Russell Crowe), who in an early flashback takes his boy and his bastard younger sibling Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) out of New York prep school and to Africa for a hunting trip during which, in his thick Russian accent, he teaches them to “never fear death. They are prey. We are predators. Men should be only animal that is dreaded.”

Nikolai is a fount of such over-the-top wisdom, informing his kids that “man who kill legend, become legend,” and that their mom died by suicide because “she was weak, sick in her mind.” The criminal is outright obsessed with strength and weakness, and he makes clear that he views Sergei as the former and Dmitri as the latter, although both of them resent him for his cruelty, with Sergei convinced that there’s no honor in killing with a gun; the righteous way to hunt is with the tools of the landscape one traverses.

When an encounter with a fearsome lion goes awry, teenage Sergei (Levi Miller) is mortally wounded. Fortunately, a young girl named Calypso stumbles upon him and pours down his throat a magic potion that she just received from her tarot card-reading granny. This brings Sergei back to life and imbues him with the power of the Earth, air, and animals, and 16 years later—upon fleeing his dad and abandoning Dmitri—he’s now a mythic assassin known as the “Hunter.”

Going by Kraven, he takes out scoundrels with extreme prejudice, such as a dastardly kingpin who’s incarcerated in a maximum-security Siberian prison. He additionally kills some poachers and acquires a list of new cretins, after which he decides to find Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who’s a lawyer with whom he wants to partner in order to locate more vile targets.

Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script establishes its scenario with a preponderance of italicized statements that would barely sound good in a trailer and come across as the height of clunkiness in the full-length feature itself. Graceless doesn’t begin to describe Kraven the Hunter, whose story also involves Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), who met—and was rudely dismissed as a “nobody” by—Nikolai on the aforementioned safari, and has grown into an underworld boss with a grudge against the Kravinoff clan.

Courtesy of a mysterious benefactor, Aleksei comes to possess security camera video which proves that Sergei is the famed Hunter. To exact revenge against Nikolai, he hires a hitman known as the Foreigner (Christopher Abbot) to eliminate Kraven—a welcome task for the sunglasses-wearing hired gun, given that he has personal beef with Kraven and dreams of executing “nature’s perfect predator.”

Emblematic of Kraven the Hunter’s patchwork shoddiness is the Foreigner’s own superpower—it’s never clear if, when he counts to three, he’s freezing time or teleporting really fast. Either way, it’s a lame “trick,” and Abbott isn’t granted the opportunity to make his character interesting by voraciously chewing scenery. Not so for Crowe and Nivola, who appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can more heartily overdo it. Nivola wins that contest, especially once he reveals that, to cure his vaguely defined medical condition, he visited a doctor who made him strong, albeit with a side-effect: without medication fed constantly into his stomach via a tube, his skin hardens into an indestructible hide and he transforms into the Rhino.

Nivola makes weird non-Rhino noises, Crowe spits cartoonish vitriol, and Hechinger does his best Tony Bennett and Ozzy Osbourne impersonations as Dmitri, who’s destined to become the Chameleon. None of this matters, though, because Kraven the Hunter doesn’t care about character, drama, suspense, or logic; it’s mostly a series of perfunctory connective-tissue scenes (marked by terrible dialogue) sandwiched between dull showcases for Kraven’s might and agility.

Taylor-Johnson’s protagonist is fleet, mighty, and agile, and director Chandor has a fondness for depicting him sprinting on all fours and scaling walls like his webslinging comic-book nemesis. Despite murdering his prey with excessive violence, however, he does very little of interest during the course of his maiden big-screen outing. Nonetheless, his routine feats are still more fetching than the material’s wild beasts, which have been crafted with shockingly substandard CGI.

So second-rate is Kraven the Hunter that it’s difficult to comprehend why Chandor—whose prior credits include Margin Call, All is Lost, and A Most Violent Year—was drawn to the project in the first place. Similarly up for debate is what happened to his previously deft touch, as his latest is a lumbering throwaway devoid of precision and personality.

The closer it nears its conclusion, the more the film begins setting up sequels (and ties to Spidey), yet by that point, the idea of further Kraven movies has become wholly implausible. While the writers and director are most to blame for that situation, the cast also shoulders some responsibility, be it the wooden, perpetually posing Taylor-Johnson or the blank and flat DeBose.

Kraven the Hunter is an attempt at brand extension that never justifies its stand-alone existence and does lasting harm to the franchise it aims to bolster. At least Tom Hardy’s Venom seems like a potentially worthy and entertaining adversary for Spider-Man; Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven is merely a preachy, egotistical bore with a nonsensical code and an ill-fitting conservationist spirit. “Get to the part where I give a shit!” exclaims Rhino late in this faux-dangerous game. For viewers, that wait will last the entirety of the film’s 127-minute runtime.