Kraven the Hunter can climb sheer walls like a gorilla, snatch fish out of streams like a bear and outrun deer. But there’s something this slab of human beef can’t do: Anchor a decent movie.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the titular hero in “Kraven the Hunter,” the sixth attempt in Sony’s sputtering efforts to stock enemies for Spider-Man in movies that don’t feature the webslinger. It’s stuck in time, a callback to years ago when convoluted superhero origin stories were hot, and studios were dusting off even the poorest IP to tell stories.
The screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway attempts to build the backstory of Kraven but soon loses interest and begins adding origin stories for third-rate bad guys, like The Rhino and The Foreigner, before introducing Chameleon right at the end, as if another Kraven movie is coming. (Sony, make it stop).
Kraven, we learn, was born Sergei Kravinoff, the son of a Russian mobster who is turned into a superhero in a laughably weird plot twist. After being attacked by a lion on safari in Ghana, he’s given a mystical botanical serum mixed with lion’s blood and some mumbo jumbo about a tarot card. Clinically dead for three minutes, Kraven wakes up and is a world-class hunter. At least that’s what he keeps saying.
“Hunting people down is kind of my thing,” he says. And later: “I am the greatest hunter on the planet.” Soon he’s assassinating bad guys, but his motives aren’t always clear. Hunting isn’t exactly the same as infiltrating a high-security Siberian prison and killing a cartel boss.
Director J.C. Chandor has a very lose hand, never shaping a taut narrative or reining in his actors and sometimes letting scenes just sort of drop. The additional villains distract from what seems to be a meditation on masculinity, and the special effects are jerky and ludicrous, like a fistfight between Kraven and The Rhino — somehow still wearing pants — that prompted some laughter at a recent screening.
Part of the problem is that Kraven’s powers aren’t clearly defined. He’s supposed to use animal skills to hunt, but are there many four-legged predators out there proficient with a blow dart or a pen to the trachea? He hates poachers but wears a tooth necklace and a leather bomber jacket.
Kraven’s eyes sometimes glow but with no apparent benefit other than to make Taylor-Johnson look even more badass as he glares into the camera, shirtless. He does have the ability to focus his attention on faraway objects, like when he spots a dropped cigarette and identifies it as a Turkish brand, a skill really low on the superhero must-haves.
The movie suggests Kraven can communicate with animals, like Aquaman, but, if so, he’s really, really bad at it. At best, they just sort of tolerate him. A tiger at one point jumps him and you can’t blame it.
Kraven has been shaped largely in opposition to his drug kingpin dad played by Russell Crowe, who has apparently watched “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle” to nail his thick, comical Russian accent. “Never fear death,” he tells his son. “Man who kill legend, become legend.”
Crowe’s dad is a whisky-neat, all-testosterone, Tony Bennett-loving guy who detests any sign of weakness or kindness. He kills animals for fun, uses cocktail waitresses as human shields, doesn’t pay ransoms because that makes him seem soft and dismisses his wife’s suicide with the comment: “She was weak.”
If Crowe is cartoonish to the point of parody, Alessandro Nivola as a human-rhino hybrid makes him look like Sir Laurence Olivier. There are few instances of someone overacting more in a movie, unnecessarily adding an undercurrent of murderous, jokey psychotic to an already bizarre creation. The costume department has also dropped the ball here, giving The Rhino a small, stringed backpack that looks like it was found in the discount bins at Kohl’s.
Two good actors — Fred Hechinger as Kraven’s younger brother and Ariana DeBose as his lawyer-ally — are left marooned in a movie that tumbles and slips to a unsatisfactory end. Is Kraven a hero or a villain? Who cares? Without Spider-Man, what’s really the point, right?
“Kraven the Hunter,” a Sony Pictures release that hits theaters Friday, is rated R for “strong bloody violence and language.” Running time: 127 minutes. One star out of four.
