They call him Kraven the Hunter, but he could go by many names.
Kraven the Unnecessary.
Kraven the Forgettable.
Kraven the Dud.
Despite the presence of a charismatic leading man, two Academy Award winners in key supporting roles and a director of substance, “Kraven the Hunter” is another giant swing-and-a-miss for Sony Pictures’ stand-alone Spider-Man villain roster, following the “Venom” trilogy, “Morbius” and “Madame Web.” (That’s a lineup so weak it makes the historically bad 2024 Chicago White Sox seem like heavy hitters.)
Clocking in at a slow-jog time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, filled with howlingly bad CGI creations, green-screen scenes that would have looked rudimentary in the early 2000s and clunky dialogue, “Kraven” doesn’t even provide much in the way of camp value. It’s just an undercooked pile of steaming mediocrity. Even the somewhat rare distinction of an R rating for a superhero movie seems like a desperate gimmick; the violence is gory but still cartoonish, and when one character invokes a particularly graphic expletive as a punchline, it’s such an obvious and desperate attempt at a “Yippee-Ki-Yay” viral moment that you almost expect said character to wink at the camera and take a bow.
Directed by J.C. Chandor (“All Is Lost,” “A Most Violent Year,” “Triple Frontier”) from a screenplay credited to trio of writers (Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) who have much better titles on their respective resumes, “Kraven the Hunter” opens with arguably the best sequence in the entire movie. Aaron-Taylor Johnson’s Sergei Kravinoff, who prefers to be known as “Kraven with a K,” infiltrates a maximum-security prison and quickly knocks off a Russian crime boss whose prison cell is an even nicer setup than the one Paulie Cicero had in “Goodfellas.” I mean, the guy had a flat screen TV and a mini-fridge and a mountain of toilet paper before Kraven ended him. In a nifty escape sequence, Kraven displays superhuman strength, Spidey-like abilities to scale walls and lightning-quick speed. Good stuff.
The story then grinds to a near-halt with an overlong flashback from 16 years prior, as young Sergei (played by Levi Miller) and his squirrelly half-brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt) get yanked out of private school by their gruff and brutish crime boss father Nikolai, played by Russell Crowe, who injects at least a measure of life into the proceedings with his thick, Boris Badenov accent.
After informing the boys their mother has killed herself because she was sick and weak, Nikolai takes them on a big-game hunt in Africa, and get this: Sergei is gravely wounded by a gigantic CGI lion who looks nothing like an actual lion, and Nikolai shoots and wounds the lion, and the lion drags Sergei away, and the lion’s blood mixes with Sergei’s blood, and then a teenage girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) happens upon Sergei and gives him a dose of her grandmother’s magic potion, and THAT’S how Sergei becomes … drumroll … Kraven the Hunter!
Back to present day. Kraven uses his legendary hunting skills to track down and dispatch criminals, while Dmitri (now played by Fred Hechinger) is a nightclub entertainer who has a chameleonic ability to mimic others, including Tony Bennett, I kid you not. Why, it’s almost as if Dmitri will one day morph into a character known as Chameleon.
Now that the Russian crime boss is no longer in the picture, there’s a power grab for the top position, with Nikolai pitted against his archrival, one Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a snarling mercenary who can turn into a human-rhino hybrid — kind of like the Hulk, only with even rougher skin and horns. Meanwhile, Calypso (now played by Ariana DeBose) has become a high-powered lawyer who teams up with Kraven, and oh, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Aleksei/Rhino has enlisted the services of the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), a master assassin who seems to have the ability to stop time for a couple of seconds so he can get the drop on his opponents.
That’s a lot to cram into one origins story, leaving little room for any true character development. Aaron-Taylor Johnson sports an eight-pack and preens for the camera while belting out the stilted dialogue and engaging in VFX-laden battle sequences. The disconnect between the human actors and the CGI animals is insanely skewed; there’s never a moment when it looks like they’re sharing the same space in this world. The wonderful Ariana DeBose looks lost and only partially committed to her thinly drawn character, and even Russell Crowe’s hammy scene-grabbing wears thin in the end. Like Morbius and Madame Web, the character of Kraven seems destined to become a marginal footnote in the history of superhero movie characters.