‘Kraven the Hunter’ review: Well, that certainly was a movie
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If you’re wondering if Kraven the Hunter is as bad as everyone says it is…well, it isn’t great. And this is coming from the girl who loves Kraven as a Spider-Man villain most of all. This movie exists though so let’s talk about it.
Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by three men (Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway), the movie really said “what if that one Spider-Man villain had unnecessary powers?” I wish I was kidding. I love Kraven because he is, for the most part, just a guy who loves hunting and he hates spiders. So of course he hunts Spider-Man.
With Kraven the Hunter, Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is attacked by a lion and the lion’s blood mixes with a potion that a young girl gives him to turn him into a super powered man who hunts down bad guys. Decidedly not what he is like in the comics. In fact, they do the opposite of his comic origins and he doesn’t like that his father is a game hunter. You know, Kraven’s entire deal.
The movie is bloody and aggressive and the action sequences make up for a lot of the bad script but not enough for me to forgive this movie for what it did to my boy. Kraven isn’t a guy who is trying to hunt down bad guys. He’s a game hunter. A fact that this movie seems to forget and ignore in order to make Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) the big bad.
Nikolai is a brutal father to his sons, Sergei and Dimitri (played by Fred Hechinger). And there is not a redeeming quality about him. Yet he is more like Kraven than actual Kraven the Hunter is in this movie.
He’s just a guy! Why are we doing all of this?!
When I tell you that 90% of this movie’s problems stem from them adding unnecessary nonsense to Kraven’s backstory. To be clear: In the comics, Kraven does take a potion to make him have super human capabilities. But he takes it, it wears off, and he has to take it again. It is not a thing that happens to him that makes him really strong all the time.
Calypso (Ariana DeBose) does work with Kraven but she is not a lawyer who doesn’t quite understand how to casually say “yeah, the guys are here.” My point is simply that why Kraven is a fun villain comes from his need to hunt the most dangerous game. In his case, that is Spider-Man. Since Sony continues to make Spider-Man-less Spider-Man stories, there came Kraven the Hunter‘s dilemma.
Sure, it is an origin story and the last shot gave me what I wanted from a Kraven the Hunter movie BUT it took 2 hours of nonsense to get there. Tell me why he had to get almost eaten by a lion and why that lion had to die? None of that is part of who Kraven is. He hunts things! That’s it! You couldn’t work with that? You needed to have him have super powers?
There is a good movie in this with the Kravinoff family but the script decides that a family drama between Nikolai and his sons isn’t enough. What I wouldn’t give for a movie where Sergei says “fine, this is the game hunter you want me to be” and…just hunts things and people like his father! That’s a Kraven movie.
I want to watch whatever movie Chris Abbott and Fred Hechinger are in
There are brilliant things in this very subpar film. Mainly whatever Christopher Abbott is doing as Foreigner and Hechinger’s entire deal as Chameleon. Abbott’s Foreigner, which also unnecessarily has super powers, is living his best assassin life. I want to see this movie. In the comics, Foreigner is just a martial artist and an assassin but, as is the case with every character in this movie, he has unnecessary powers like freezing time to kill. He could, you know, just be good at being an assassin!
But Abbott really is living in a world all his own and I loved every second of it. It made me wish we just had him vs. Kraven without literally anything else. We 1000% did not need Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) in this movie. But Abbott made up for a lot of what the rest of the film was lacking.
With Hechinger’s Chameleon, he also has powers prior to really becoming the Chameleon and it begs the question: Does this movie hate that some regular dudes want to take on Spider-Man? In the comics, much like Kraven, Dimitri has a serum to help him change faces. He isn’t just naturally a mimic like this movie implies. But Hechinger is very much having fun with what he is given and the moments between Sergei and Dimitri make the over 2 hour run time feel less like a chore.
But with a heavy heart, I have to say that Kraven the Hunter did not deliver like I wanted it to. Maybe if they made a movie about KRAVEN, it would have been better. This was a movie about a guy with mutant lion abilities who really wanted to live out his Dexter Morgan fantasies. It was decidedly not Kraven the Hunter.
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