KRAVEN THE HUNTER (2024)

Studio:   Columbia Pictures/Marvel
Director: J.C. Chandor
Writer:   Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Producer: Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, David Householter
Stars:    Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Russell Crowe

Review Score:

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Summary:

A vigilante with animalistic superpowers goes to war with a crime lord to rescue his kidnapped brother while under the shadow of their ruthless father.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

By impersonating an inmate, Sergei Kravinoff infiltrates a Russian prison to confront gunrunner Semyon Chorney, the notorious leader of the Kirov Gang. Sergei identifies himself as “Kraven the Hunter,” a mysterious figure feared by criminals. After executing Chorney and his bodyguards, Sergei uses his animalistic superpowers to escape the fortified facility.

16 years earlier, Sergei’s drug lord father Nikolai Kravinoff pulls Sergei and his younger half-brother Dmitri out of boarding school at St. Michael’s Academy in New York to inform them their institutionalized mother killed herself. Nikolai then takes the boys to Tanzania for a hunting safari as part of his ongoing effort to teach them to be feared and fearless.

In Tanzania, Calypso Ezili learns how to interpret tarot cards from her mystic grandmother. Following up on the cards’ prediction, Calypso’s grandmother gives Calypso a vial filled with their family’s secret formula that will heal whoever drinks it in undreamed of ways.

During their lion hunt, Nikolai praises Sergei as his strongest son while disparaging Dmitri as a coward. Nikolai also belittles his associate Aleksei Sytsevich when Aleksei proposes a partnership between the two of them.

Sergei gets mauled and dragged away by a massive lion he refuses to shoot. Strangely drawn to him, Calypso uses her grandmother’s potion on Sergei and leaves him with the Strength tarot card. Sergei is airlifted to a hospital where he dies, but Sergei soon returns to life.

At his family’s remote manor outside London, Sergei reads a letter from his mother asking him not to become like his father. Insulting his mother as “weak,” Nikolai informs Sergei he plans to send Dmitri back to New York and keep Sergei with him to learn the ways of working his criminal empire. Sergei angrily stands up to Nikolai after discovering his father killed the lion that mauled him and mounted its head on a wall.

While gathering essential belongings, Sergei finds Calypso’s empty vial. Sergei discovers he now has enhanced, animalistic abilities while sneaking out of the mansion. On his way out, Sergei apologizes to his disappointed brother as he reveals his plan to get away from their father.

Sergei travels to Russia to hide out in a sanctuary his mother used to use. During his journey, Sergei discovers he has an unusual connection to animals that see him as more than human. Sergei becomes their protector by killing unscrupulous poachers.

Back in the present day, Sergei continues hunting and killing poachers and other criminals. Sergei tracks down Calypso, now an activist lawyer, and shows her the tarot card to identify himself as the boy whose life she saved 16 years earlier. Sergei also identifies himself as the infamous vigilante Kraven by revealing he killed Semyon Chorney, who had murdered one of Calypso’s close friends. Sergei asks for Calypso’s help locating criminals she can find more easily than him as a lawyer, but Calypso expresses reservations due to Sergei being as assassin as well as a gangster’s son.

Now known as “Rhino” due to a serum that grants him superstrength and indestructible skin, Nikolai Kravinoff’s former associate Aleksei takes control of Semyon Chorney’s forces. As part of his plan to expand his own criminal enterprise, Aleksei sends hitmen to kill Nikolai while he is at a club watching his son Dmitri sing and play piano. Nikolai kills the assassins and blames Dmitri for not protecting him.

Aleksei receives information identifying Nikolai’s other son Sergei as Kraven. Aleksei contracts the mysterious mercenary “Foreigner,” who has the power to seemingly stop time by hypnotizing targets, to track down Sergei/Kraven.

Per their annual tradition, Sergei travels to London to celebrate Dmitri’s birthday. Later that night, Aleksei’s men kidnap Dmitri while Sergei is out of the room. Sergei chases after the men, but they escape in a helicopter.

Sergei returns to Calypso, who agrees to help him find his missing brother. Sergei also appeals for help from Nikolai, who received Dmitri’s severed finger along with a ransom demand, but Nikolai refuses to pay the money to recover Dmitri. Nikolai further upsets Sergei by exploiting the guilt he feels for abandoning Dmitri to live alone with their father.

Foreigner manipulates a man into giving Calypso false information to lead Sergei into a trap. Calypso forwards the info on Dmitri’s supposed whereabouts to Sergei, which leads to him infiltrating a Turkish monastery where he avoids ambushes and snipers to confront suspected kidnapper Omer Ozdemir. Before the two of them are buried in the damaged monastery’s crumbling rubble, Omer confesses Aleksei Sytsevich is the real mastermind behind Dmitri’s kidnapping. Sergei escapes the avalanche and phones Calypso with a warning that both of their lives are in danger.

With Dmitri still in captivity, Aleksei informs him that Sergei was the original kidnapping target, but they took Dmitri instead since his brother wasn’t in the room. Aleksei shows Dmitri surveillance footage from the Russian prison to prove Sergei is Kraven. Knowing he was on Kraven’s kill list, Aleksei decided to go after Sergei first. After explaining how biochemist Miles Warren developed the serum that transforms him into Rhino, Aleksei proposes partnering with Dmitri to take over his father’s territory, but Dmitri refuses to betray his family.

Foreigner joins Aleksei. Foreigner explains how he wants revenge against Sergei because Kraven killed his beloved mentor. Foreigner then reveals how a unique poison left by Kraven’s blowdarts at the monastery points to Sergei being in a specific region of Siberia, where Calypso is now hiding out with him.

Aleksei and Foreigner bring Dmitri to Siberia along with a group of hitmen. Sergei sends an animal stampede to create a commotion. During the ensuing faceoff, Sergei fights off attackers by leading them into various traps and using deadly hand-to-hand combat skills.

Foreigner hits Sergei with poison darts that cause him to hallucinate being swarmed by spiders. Foreigner nearly captures Sergei, but Calypso arrives in time to kill Foreigner by shooting an arrow into his eye. Calypso uses another vial of her grandmother’s potion to revive Sergei.

Sergei sends another animal stampede to overturn Aleksei’s motorcade. Aleksei fully transforms into Rhino for a battle with Sergei that ends in Aleksei’s death. Dmitri is rescued.

Sergei tracks Nikolai to a campsite in Russia. There, Sergei confronts his father with the revelation that he knows Nikolai sent Aleksei the prison footage proving Sergei is Kraven. Nikolai admits he knew Sergei would never eliminate Rhino on Nikolai’s behalf, so he manipulated events to make Rhino go after Kraven. Sergei secretly removes the shells from Nikolai’s shotgun and leaves him to be mauled by a bear.

One year later, Sergei travels to London to celebrate Dmitri’s birthday again. Dmitri reveals he got his finger back thanks to a doctor in New York. With Dmitri now in control of Nikolai’s empire, he and Sergei argue over their conflicting moral codes and Dmitri’s transition into becoming like their father. Before Dmitri walks away, Sergei discovers his brother now has chameleon-like shapeshifting abilities.

Acting on his brother’s instructions, Sergei returns to their family manor to find Nikolai left Sergei a distinct hunting vest made from the lion’s skin and mane. Sergei dons the vest.

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Review:

In the comics books, it takes the superhuman strength and heroism of Spider-Man to defeat Kraven the Hunter. In the real world, all it took was a boringly by-the-book script and sluggish storytelling to kill the movie bearing the character’s name, and probably the entire future of Sony’s Spider-Man extended universe along with it.

“Kraven the Hunter” might as well be renamed “Kraven the Explainer,” as it’s much more of an unnecessarily tedious origin story than an action-intensive adventure. It’s not a bad idea to focus on building up background, particularly for a second-stringer many viewers aren’t already familiar with. But with this reportedly being the last in Sony’s planned line of Spidey-related spotlights, the movie ends up being a lot of exhausting setup to establish someone we’re highly unlikely to ever see again in this incarnation. It’s like reading the first chapter of an unfinished book that wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

The bigger issue with “Kraven the Hunter” being a live-action Wikipedia entry for its central figure is that its extensive exposition is neither unique nor intriguing. Painted as a misunderstood vigilante rather than a true villain, Kraven’s bio comes from standard superhero/supervillain stuff. One parent’s tragic death and the other parent’s overbearing presence stoke conflicting emotional fires for his compassion and for his rage. A secret potion grants him incredible abilities. Then come a couple of scenes where he figures out what these abilities are, like extraordinary parkour skills, enhanced strength, and uncanny communication with animals that see him as an equal.

It bears mentioning all of this occurs after a pre-title prologue where we witness Kraven using these incredible powers to infiltrate a Russian prison, savagely take down a crime lord’s bodyguards, and make a daring escape through gunfire and hungry wolves. Then the film screeches that energy to a halt to flip over for almost a full half-hour of flashbacks. Going backwards doesn’t introduce the excitement of discovery since we’ve already seen the outcome, extinguishing any element of surprise in a tale that’s already familiar to anyone who has seen a single comic book movie before.

The actual plot doesn’t kick off until well past the halfway point in a two-hour runtime, which is way too late for any story to finally reach its full speed. This is when Kraven’s half-brother Dmitri gets kidnapped by their gangster father’s vengeful rival, a version of Rhino whose shockingly flat CGI makes him look messier than Paul Giamatti’s tattoo-headed version in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”

To get his brother back, Kraven seeks help from Calypso, the girl who spent thirty serendipitous seconds using her grandmother’s magic formula to revive Kraven when he was mauled by a lion as a teenager, then never saw him again. Now working as an activist lawyer, Calypso and Kraven’s entire present-day relationship consists of several minutes talking at a funeral, several more minutes talking in her firm’s office, and even more minutes talking on a public park bench like they’re in “500 Days of Summer” instead of a supposed superhero epic.

Rhino doesn’t directly interact with Kraven until the climax, which is a terrible way to present an antagonist intended to be seen as a formidable foe when he’s barely seen at all. In the meantime, the movie gives Kraven a different adversary, The Foreigner, yet underwhelmingly dispatches him using a single arrow fired by someone else, making his feud with Kraven as meagerly motivated and maintained as the one with Rhino. Every other enemy Kraven faces is just some variation of a plain mercenary or a lookalike thug who should be wearing striped shirts and robber masks for how disposably dull they are.

Kraven’s biggest battle isn’t against Rhino, Foreigner, or even his drug lord father Nikolai. It’s with “Morbius” (review here) and “Madame Web” (review here) for whose Spider-Man spinoff earns the biggest woof as a complete dog, though I might clasp my leash around “Kraven the Hunter.” The other two have some small entertainment value as bizarre curiosities for how stupidly silly they are. Between its long lulls of dialogue-heavy development and seldom-seen stunt sequences with standard staging, “Kraven the Hunter” is simply a snore.

Of all the Spider-Man media “Kraven the Hunter” could possibly bring to mind, including the classic comic crossover “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” what the movie makes me think of most is a “Saturday Night Live” skit where Fred Armisen plays Frank Gublin, an accident attorney specializing in “clients who have sustained injuries while working at or attending the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” As Gublin listed possible reasons for an audience member suing the production, including “confused by plot” and “insulted legacy of Spider-Man,” by far the one that made me laugh most was “fell asleep so suddenly I hit head on seat in front of me.” Expect a call Mr. Gublin. I’d like to file that same complaint against “Kraven the Hunter.”

Review Score: 35

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