‘Kraven the Hunter’ movie review: The audience is hunted in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe film

Kraven the Hinter movie review: The dubbing is off, the editing is choppy and the VFX unimpressive; the film’s biggest takeaway is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who carries it on his massive shoulders

A long, icy road is the first shot of Kraven the Hunter, the sixth film in the infamous Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU). Given how all the other films, except the Venom movies, turned out to be fiascos, the very first shot of Kraven felt like a metaphor for the studio’s long and trying journey with Marvel’s IPs. After all, it’s not a lot to work with when you only have characters commonly associated with Spider-Man and you cannot even use the friendly neighbourhood superhero. Despite being far better than Morbius and Madame Web, Sony’s latest and possibly final superhero outing, Kraven the Hunter, still misses its mark by miles. 

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays Kraven in the new film, is not new to the world of Marvel. After playing the titular role in Kick-Ass followed by Pietro Maximoff in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Taylor-Johnson takes it up a notch in Kraven the Hunter in which he looks very much the part. After escaping the clutches of his abusive father Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) and running away, leaving his younger brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) behind, Sergei (Taylor-Johnson) turns into a hunter residing in his late mother’s sanctuary in Russia. Like any superhero film, trouble comes knocking his way and Sergei has to tap into his animal instincts and turn into the greatest hunter the world has seen. 

As a fan of Hollywood films, living in the Eastern hemisphere comes with its cons; with most of the biggies releasing first in the West, the reception it receives there travels faster than the film itself. Kraven the Hunter — like the random deer Nikolai shoots to teach his sons a lesson on being powerful — was shot down mercilessly by critics. So unsurprisingly, it was with dampened expectations I caught Kraven the Hunter which, surprisingly, had a little more to offer than its Sony sinister siblings. 

Unlike the other non-Venom entries in this universe (with only half a dozen films, shouldn’t it be called something smaller? How about a galaxy?), the film’s biggest takeaway is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who carries the film on his massive shoulders. Add to that some impressive action set pieces which are, thankfully, R-rated, and make for some lovely visuals for those fans of carnage (Venom pun intended). A scene from the trailer that got me hooked was a barefooted Taylor-Johnson chasing a van down Central London and it managed to live up to expectations.

But almost everything apart from these aspects is a royal mess and that’s where the film falters. Not only is the wafer-thin plot painfully predictable but the secondary characters, despite being played by able performers, such Academy Award-winner Ariana DeBose, are reduced to one-dimensional muppets who add little to the overall narrative. Playing Calypso, a supervillain with a glorious past in the world of comics, DeBose is reduced to a lawyer who happens to be at the right place at the right time with either a deck of tarot cards or a magic potion that would bring back to life our titular hero. Alessandro Nivola as Rhino and Christopher Abbott as the Foreigner offer very little apart from probably making it to the top of the weirdest villains from the world of Marvel list. 

Still, it’s those behind the camera that happen to be the biggest villains of Kraven the Hunter. The dubbing is off, the editing is choppy and for a film that’s meant to have a jungle worth of CG animals, the VFX is unimpressive. The film gets bogged down under the mammoth weight of the issues and that’s a gunshot difficult to recover from. Kraven the Hunter might have worked had it been released before the countless superhero films put its audience in permanent superhero fatigue. With the new film trying to supersede far superior works that came our way in the recent past, KraventheHunter feels like an able hunter looking for a non-existing prey in an overgrown garden he mistook for a forest. Let’s see if the universe’s upcoming series Spider-Noir can sling its way out of the deep hole the studio has dug itself into.

Kraven the Hunter is running in Indian theatres