Review: ‘Kraven the Hunter’ is an offensively fangless film that treats its audience like dumb animals

Sure, all of cinema is ruled by IP imperialism these days, but Sony’s Spider-Man Universe — the ironic name for a franchise that is defined by the absence of its titular hero — is easily the most egregious example of Hollywood’s determination to herd us into multiplexes with the promise of something facile but familiar. The good news is Kraven the Hunter might be the last of its kind. The bad news is we wish the franchise had gone extinct one movie earlier.

You know the Netflix romcom Hot Frosty? Well, Kraven is essentially Hot Doolittle. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as Sergei Kravinoff, a comic book character known for being a big game hunter and wearing animal furs, here reimagined as a possessor of nebulous animal-themed powers and self-appointed protector of animalkind/assassin of evil men. Unfortunately, one such evil man is Kraven’s own father, Russian mobster Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), who he is determined to bring down.

Although this synopsis suggests a potentially diverting revenge thriller with themes of family trauma, Kraven turns out to be an unsurprisingly fangless affair from this most sauceless of shared universes. At 2 hours, 7 minutes, it’s the longest SSU entry to date and, trust me, you feel every minute of it, as the movie moves from one uninvolving scene to the next — whether it be an overly edited action sequence or a ponderous dialogue exchange.

Director J.D. Chandor (The Most Violent Year, Triple Frontier) has previously built up an impressive body of work full of muscular action and crime films, but here he seems totally lost with what to make of a story starring a guy with super-strength and super, uh, *checks notes* lion-vision? To be fair to Chandor, Kraven has as much heinously matched-up dubbing as Madame Web before it so it’s possible this poor puppy was neutered in post-production.

Still, we can’t blame Sony’s after-the-fact meddling for the cast’s total lack of energy or chemistry. This is certainly the weakest of Crowe’s trilogy of superhero dad performances (missing either the gravitas of Man of Steel‘s Jor-El or the outrageousness of Thor: Love and Thunder‘s Zeus) and then there’s poor Ariana DeBose (who, after Argylle and now this, needs to have a serious chat with her agent). The West Side Story star is stuck in a thankless role as Calypso, a voodoo priestess turned hotshot city lawyer (???), the only female character of note in the entire 127 minutes.

As for Taylor-Johnson, the effort he put into getting in shape for the role (apparently, he trained for a full two years) is evident on screen, with the R-rated action at least having a brutality to it that previous Sony efforts lacked. That said, the threadbare script leaves him little to get his acting chops around, meaning he mostly just emotes through the raise of a single eyebrow — ironically for a potential future James Bond — à la Roger Moore.

The one thing that can be said about Kraven is that, outside of some unintentionally hilarious CGI, it avoids falling prey to the same crazed campness of its forebears. And yet this, I would argue, is Kraven‘s greatest sin. It isn’t as bad as its brother and sisters in this shared universe, and therefore it loses the one thing that makes this franchise watchable in the first place. Morbius and Madame Web might’ve been exhausting if viewed from start to finish, but occasionally they had flashes of true insanity that were a delight to witness — or meme about online, if you were smart enough not to buy tickets. With Kraven, you can practically feel how terrified the filmmakers are of their project suffering the same fate so instead they rigidly stick to as rote as story as possible, a script calcified into cliche, to avoid creating anything that might generate a meme.

Well, congrats, Sony, you succeeded. Unfortunately, strip away the dad-dancing Matt Smith, the weird Michael Keaton cameo, and working with Dakota Johnson’s mom in the Amazon when she was researching spiders right before she died, and you’re left with nothing to paper over the cracks. To watch Kraven is to stare into the abyss of all that’s wrong with contemporary cinema: corporate-mandated brand extensions poorly masquerading as storytelling.

Or, to put it another way, it’s like wandering around a zoo and gazing through the bars at a mighty creature that has now grown lethargic and dead-eyed. Or perhaps it is we that are the animals? Animals fed studio-processed slop who line up dutifully to be milked for our money. At least, like the critters of Animal Farm, we seem to be rebelling, as Kraven‘s atrocious opening weekend attests to. If reports are correct and this is the death knell of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, maybe there are better, wilder, livelier times ahead for the superhero movie genre. It can surely only be stronger without the lame duck that is the SSU around. For all SSU movies are awful, but some SSU movies are more awful than others.