Movie Review: Kraven The Hunter

Kraven the Hunter is not bad; it is not good; it is something that he tried hard to be and could not.

The SonyVerse of Spider-Man villains without this arachnid hero continues to give something to talk about, from the idea of ​​bringing these characters to the big screen it seemed that all this would connect in some way and at some point with the MCU and that did not happen.

Venom (2018), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2024) and Venom: The Last Dance (2024) did the same in their time on the big screen, stories that left much to be desired among friends and strangers and the connection with who should be made was increasingly distant.

If we take into account that these characters are good and work in their context, it is not something that could last long enough to create a universe within the vast multiverse that would continue to be of interest to studio executives and much less to the public.

Ending 2024 it is Kraven The Hunter’s turn to close this year, we will finally know the origin of one of the most feared and visceral villains of Marvel Comics, what could have been a great idea failed box office failure with this weak franchise and now we wonder, will this closure give way to something better or will we be left waiting for something worthy and spectacular?

What is Kraven The Hunter about?

From a very young age, Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) was trained to become a merciless hunter in search of a coveted trophy which would cost him his life and a transformation that is hard to believe, now turned into Kraven The Hunter and endowed with a connection with animals he can track any prey, his most important hunt will come when his brother is kidnapped and he has to face an antagonist as he has never seen before, The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) will do everything possible to seize the power he has longed for.

There is no doubt that this film has changed change since it was conceived and planned to be one of the main antagonists in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy (2002-2007) which was scrapped when the entire project was canceled and the franchise was restarted. After this, in 2017, Sony Pictures announced its shared universe and intended for this to be a usable complement to the Spider-Man films and as part of the MCU. The studio was already considering a Kraven film and it was thought that he could appear in Black Panther (2018) but this did not happen either.

After the failure of the first drafts of the script, the proposal continued and finally in 2021 it was formally announced that director JC Chandor would be the one to carry out this ambitious project, having Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway as new screenwriters, leaving Donny Cates, Chris Bremner, Chandor, Adamma Ebo, Adanne Ebo, Zak Olkewicz and Oren Uziel as additional writers. Who intended to merge everything that had been written and rescue the best ideas to give them a new form and meaning.

If we add to the above that the strike of screenwriters and actors in 2023, caused a great delay in its release, it was planned to be released on October 6 of that same year, then this was modified and changed to August 30, 2024, and because the film did not pass the preliminary tests, considering it too violent, reshoots were made to finally release it on December 13 of this same year, as project things changed radically and the original idea was transformed into another blockbuster.

The film starts simple and easy to understand with a formula that has been used in other works. First, we see an opening sequence in which Sergei Kravinoff, now transformed into Kraven, enters a maximum security Soviet prison where he will have to kill an arms dealer, a mission that has a very good dose of action and is a key point for everything that will come later. In a flashback, we are told that after the death of his mother, Sergei and his half-brother Dmitri are taken from their school and taken by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) on a hunting trip in Tanzania at the same time prepare Sergei to take charge of his drug trafficking operations.

At a midway point, we meet a girl who is with her grandmother who reveals to her secrets of the cards and of her destiny, and also gives her a potion that can cure in a surprising way beyond science and human understanding. This girl is Calypso who will be Sergei’s love interest but who will be able to use her knowledge to help him in the future.

In the hunt we also meet Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) a small-time and useless mercenary who tries to become Nikolai’s partner in his business but is rejected and humiliated and then wants to take revenge on him and his family, with the help of an experimental serum he can transform into a human-rhino hybrid who will be known as Rhino, doing his own dirty business by allying himself with dangerous enemies and hitmen like the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) who is capable of performing seemingly inhuman feats through intense concentration that puts his opponent in a hypnotic trance through eye contact, making whoever looks at him believe that the Foreigner can move faster than the eye can see.

Sergei is mortally wounded while protecting his brother from a seemingly mystical lion, making him a legend in that territory and a coveted prey for Nikolai. After being attacked and carried away in the jaws of the beast and being seriously injured, Sergei is found by Calypso, who, having been warned by her grandmother that she would intervene in an accident and change things, would give whoever drinks it great power, leaving a tarot card with him.

Once we meet and establish the characters, things start to change in favor of the script. We see a very powerful Kraven who can communicate with animals and has superhuman abilities, which gives him an advantage over his enemies. Unlike the comic, here he doesn’t hunt animals but evil people, as we can see in a sequence where some poachers kill a herd of buffalo to remove their horns and sell them on the black market. This is how he makes a notebook containing the names of powerful people he’s going to hunt just because of the justification that they pay for their crimes.

After meeting Calypso again, who in this version is a lawyer and not a very bad-natured voodoo priestess, he makes it clear that he will be able to help Sergei in his crusade indirectly, since she miraculously, and in favor of a poorly written script, has contacts with everyone, and just as Kraven is an invisible hunter, she is an expert in phone calls to obtain information.

After a meeting with his brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), he is kidnapped by Aleksei who pretends to ask for a supposed ransom for him, we see a chase sequence, apart from the fact that Kraven spends all his time running during this sequence, it must be said that it is very well done where we can see more specifically his abilities, after this event he communicates with Calypso who is already willing to help him and through his contacts taken out of nowhere he finds out that his brother has been taken to an abandoned monastery in Turkey supposedly very secret.

In a conversation between Dmitri and Aleksei, the latter reveals that he has tried an experimental serum that makes him transform into a Rhino, information that does not go unnoticed by the young man and that again in favor of the script will be used later to reveal that after a visit to this doctor he can now transform into whoever he wants, taking charge of his father’s dirty business he will have a new mafia identity, the Chameleon.

After another well-crafted battle, where we see Kraven fall into the void and is supposedly crushed by rocks, he miraculously survives and brutally kills his attackers and then travels to his private sanctuary where he will meet with Calypso, where Aleksei is already waiting for them along with the Foreigner and they use Dmitri as bait to hunt the hunter. Aleksei and the Foreigner ambush Kraven, who after drugging him with a powerful neurotoxin, the Foreigner attacks Kraven but does not count on Calypso’s cunning and sagacity in the use of the crossbow and kills him with an arrow and revives Kraven again with the miraculous formula.

Already recovered from everything and back to life, Kraven has a decisive and final encounter with Aleksei who now transforms into Rhino, in his favor, Kraven uses a stampede of buffalo to help him stop the convoy where they have his brother and rescue him, in this violent encounter and despite becoming the Rhino and briefly dominating Kraven Aleksei dies.

The supposed twist comes when Kraven discovers that it was Nikolai himself who gave Dmitri to Aleksei to supposedly make him a braver and stronger man and not the weak coward that he is, Kraven using his superpowers tracks his father to a forest Nikolai reveals that he knew Aleksei had him in his sights and manipulated them at will to eliminate him, a job that Kraven unknowingly completed very well, he refuses to kill his father and after stealing the ammunition from his weapon it is a bear that takes care of this.

A year after gaining shape-shifting abilities from the doctor who experimented on Aleksei, Dmitri disowns Kraven stating that he and his father were both hunters in search of their next big trophy, now at his dead father’s house Kraven discovers a note along with a vest made from the skin of the slain lion that attacked him as a child and that by a drop of its blood and with the mixture of Calypso’s grandmother’s secret potion he finally transforms into a new Kraven.

In short, this is what we see on screen and the multiple flaws they have after the cuts and re-recordings are evident, dialogues that were edited and added at key moments in which the characters are either with their backs turned or off camera, the excessive abuse of CGI does not help much in the scenes in which despite being good everything happens too fast with endless cuts, the production design looks asymmetrical because while some things look good others like Rhino’s appearance leave much to be desired, a villain that we had already seen before played by Paul Giamatti in a biomechanical suit in the infamous The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014).

All these flaws make the film a mockery of what the character is, but in itself, it is not to blame, the original idea of ​​it being violent was better than the final result, for example in the opening sequence in the Soviet prison Kraven gouged out his adversary’s eyes with the tiger’s tooth and here that was changed or the post-credits scene that involved Kraven in a cave having Spider-Man as his new target.

We could doubt the work of director J. C. Chandor with this film, which in the end is not to blame for the multiple changes that the studios made to the script and the delays that this caused in post-production, including new recordings. The script loses all credibility and seriousness by betraying itself and pretending that all of this is an action film within the superhero genre for adults. It is not surprising that this entire universe has been a failure because they did not know how to give it a correct direction from the beginning. They only wanted to be complementary and secretly compete with Marvel Studios for the characters and make us believe that at some point all of this could make sense and we would see them face Spider-Man, alone and separately or as a group of villains.

It is still incomprehensible how a villain must face other villains and end up in a more anti-hero or redeemed villain position that can learn from his mistakes and transform into something different without losing the idea of ​​what he is, this is what the studios, whatever they are, have not understood about their characters and create franchises and sagas that go nowhere and some entertain and others do not.

This work completely misinterprets all the characters and justifies it in a more than absurd way by saying that this belongs to another universe within the Marvel multiverse in cinema in general, although we can understand that the variants can be interesting, not knowing how to use the resource that they propose is just a waste of talent and money, until now there are few films and directors as well as actors who have understood this concept well that if worked as it is the result would be completely different.

The much-wasted cast is made up of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott and Russell Crowe who do more than they can with the very little they have. On the one hand, there is Taylor-Johnson who half understands what the essence of the character and his motivations are and is very limited in his dialogues and on the other we have Crowe who does not make an effort to act as himself and as an unlovable character who could have been better with another actor.

The music composed by Benjamin Wallfisch and with the collaboration of Evgueni and Sacha Galperine may be the only thing that is apart and outside the entire context of the film, elaborate pieces that completely move away from the African and sinister tone that it should have, work as a complement that tries to help this film to be audiovisually a bit shocking.

In conclusion, Kraven the Hunter is not only a series of big failures and mistakes, it is a film that is not to blame for being what it is, that after so many delays no one remembered that it existed and that serves as an example of what is a bad planning, a terrible edition and a bad management of the resources and characters, thus ending a universe that could have given a lot, as a film it is not bad, it is not good either and it strives to have its own identity and personality but it could not, however, it fulfills the purpose of being entertaining and better than other productions of this finished saga.

Let’s hope that the next projects that Sony has with Spider-Man are much better and that if we see these characters again in other actors, they will be closer to what they are and will be much more convincing.

Kraven the Hunter is now available in movie theaters throughout the country.