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Goodbye, Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man universe. You died as you lived: strange and sloppy. A recent report, published in The Wrapclaims it has been long overdue Kraven the Hunter will be the last attempt to launch a franchise based entirely on the intertwined hero’s gallery of enemies, now that Tom Hardy has left the somewhat successful, and occasionally charming, Venom films. Morbius (2022) and Madame Web (2024), meanwhile, bombed at the box office while seeming to incite them its own kind of delirium, widespread hysteria.
Kraven the Hunter is packed with the kind of bizarre sights we’ve come to expect from Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (or SSU): Aaron Taylor-Johnson, shoeless and wild as our titular hero, running around London on all fours and (literally) climbing walls; Russell Crowe in a little scarf with a Boris-and-Natasha Russian accent from Rocky and Bullwinkle; A CGI bison with the most dangerous mug you’ve ever seen.
However, this time JC Chandor is at the helm, a director with a strong back catalog of dramas – Margin Call (2011), All is lost (2013), The most violent year (2014), Triple Frontier (2019) – all about the extremes people will go to for self-preservation. Kraven the Hunter is the most actively frustrating of the SSU films because you can see what Chandor was trying to make. Every now and then he seems to desperately slip to the surface, only to be beaten back by requests to add another CGI leopard or a scene where Kraven dramatically reveals to a guy, “I hunt… people.”
Kraven, otherwise known as Sergei Kravinoff, tries to wrestle with himself and his half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, accomplished in the realm of sad and snotty, as already proved by Gladiator II), under the malevolent influence of their mobster father, Nikolaj (Crowe). So this is a simple but solid story about whether we are destined to become parents or whether it is possible to break free from our circumstances.
Not so fast! Dmitry has a natural gift for mimicry and tries to win his father’s love by opening a club where he can perform quirky covers of Harry Styles and Tony Bennett (“I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Tony Bennett,” Crowe nails it). Sergei—and it takes an incredibly long flashback to explain this—was the victim of an unfortunate incident involving lions that left him with big cat blood in his veins, after being reanimated with the help of Vodou magic wielded by a younger version of Ariana DeBose’s Calypso ( later, she re-enters the story as an investigating lawyer). Now he always lands on his feet, can smell even the faintest scent, and has eyes with telescopic zoom capabilities. Taylor-Johnson lets her single slanted eyebrow do most of the work.
There is a power vacuum in the mob that Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) is trying to fill. We’re introduced to him with an emo fringe and an unnamed “condition” – years later he’s emerged with a skin-hardening treatment that turns him into a human-rhino hybrid (and a real eye, one of the worst villains in recent memory). Nivola, having probably recognized how stupid this all is, amplifies it to the maximum. In response to bad news, he hisses like a snake, despite telling us—over and over again—that he is, in fact, a Rhino. Christopher Abbott stars as an assassin named The Stranger, who looks cool and looks cool, but is seemingly banned from appearing for more than a minute. He is angry because Kraven killed his mentor. Will we find out who that mentor is? Absolutely not!
Chandor is able to sneak in the rare inventive shot or gnarly kill (the film’s US R- rating means this is bloodier than usual). But the screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway is deeply scattered, and such a relentless amount of re-recorded dialogue is inserted that there is little cohesion between or even within scenes. Requiescat in pace, Sony’s Marvel Universe – you really hurt people’s brains.
Directed by JC Chandor. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Russell Crowe. Cert 15, 127 min.
‘Kraven the Hunter’ is in cinemas from August 13