Kraven the Hunter (2024) Review: A Generic Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie That isn’t Worth Hunting

Once upon a time, Sam Raimi planned to introduce Kraven the Hunter to pit against Tobey Maguire’s Spidey in Spider-Man 4, but unfortunately, the project got scrapped. That would be a dream come true for (many) fans to see Spider-Man vs Kraven the Hunter on the big screen, given the latter’s being one of the most formidable foes in the Spider-Man comic-book universe.

Fast-forward to today and three postponed dates later since January 2023, we finally have a Kraven the Hunter movie with a beefed-up Aaron Taylor-Johnson playing the titular role and acclaimed director J.C. Chandor of All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year and Triple Frontier helmed his first comic-book movie. Except the movie we got here is under the much-maligned Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), unless you want to count the somewhat financially successful Venom trilogy. Still, the latter partially works due to Tom Hardy’s go-for-broke performance playing the titular character.

This year has been disastrous for the SSU, where I found — creatively speaking, that is — Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance gave the already-saturated superhero cinema a bad name. Now that Kraven the Hunter is finally here, how does it stack up against the rest of the SSU movies before this?

Well, the good thing is, Chandor knows how to shoot the action sequences in a coherent way that you can at least see what’s going on on the big screen, unlike the incomprehensible ones seen in Madame Web. He demonstrates that right from the pre-credits opening sequence as we witness Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) kill a mob boss and his men in a Russian prison in cold blood. It was a competently-shot action sequence but what follows next is a lengthy flashback that takes us back to 16 years earlier when Kraven was just a teenager (Levi Miller).

We learn his real name is Sergei Kravinoff, where his wealthy stern father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) takes him and his younger son, Dimitri (Billy Barratt), who is actually Sergei’s half-brother on a hunting trip in Africa. Then comes an unfortunate incident where Sergei encounters a lion ends up injured and nearly dies before a young girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) somehow saves his life by giving him a potion, coupled with a lion’s blood drop into his wound that forever alters Sergei’s DNA.

Back to the present day, the now-adult Sergei calls himself Kraven, and he has since become a vigilante-like hunter targeting criminals and poachers. He has superhuman strength with the speed and agility of a lion and even heightened senses that enable him to see from afar.

When his half-brother (now played by Fred Hechinger) is kidnapped by mercenaries working for Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), who wears a backpack attached to a tube to his body containing a serum all the time. He also calls himself Rhino, an alter-ego resulting from an experiment in which he took part that gives him the strength and appearance of a rhino-human hybrid. And this happens if he disconnects the tube and we would see scaly rhino skin slowly transform his body.

So, the scene where Dimitri is first kidnapped leads to a reasonably entertaining chase set-piece from Kraven running at a high speed before leaping from the height and landing on a speeding van. Chandor also has the advantage of an R-rating, making it the first SSU movie to be rated as such, allowing him to showcase a few violent set pieces (the climactic jungle ambush comes to mind), albeit in a flimsy CG blood.

But for all his technical competence in the action department and Aaron Taylor Johnson’s physically demanding role as the titular character, Kraven the Hunter remains a missed opportunity. A huge one at that too, beginning with its exposition-heavy and generic screenplay — credited to Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway — lacks sufficient dramatic and emotional weight. The movie is simply as derivative as it gets to the point I find its two-hour length feels longer than usual. The introduction of Ariana DeBose’s Calypso, who later grew up working as a lawyer, is sadly underutilised here while there’s barely any chemistry between her and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

The movie also tries to cram in more villains with Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino looking like he suffers from a shoddy CG rendering during the third act when he finally squares off against Kraven. The fight scene, in the meantime, is disappointingly brief while Nivola’s character is nothing more than your standard-issue villain who plays his role a little too seriously.

Then, there’s The Foreigner played by Christopher Abbott, a hired assassin capable of hypnotism and he would always count from one to three before killing the person. Chandor’s attempt to inject some humour does work in a certain capacity, notably in a scene where Kraven’s sense of smell puts to good (and amusing) use upon encountering a couple walking out of a restaurant.

As for the rest of the cast, Russell Crowe shows up in a decent supporting turn as Kraven’s uncompromising and strict father Nikolai in a thick Russian accent. Kraven the Hunter finally ends with a hint of a sequel but as for now, it was widely reported that Sony reportedly cancelled its plans for further Spider-Man(less) spinoff movies in the SSU.