Kraven the Hunter, 2024.
Directed by J.C. Chandor.
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Levi Miller, Billy Barratt, Diaana Babnicova, Chi Lewis-Parry, Michael Shaeffer, Dritan Kastrati, and Murat Seven.
SYNOPSIS:
Kraven’s complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff, starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
At one point during Kraven the Hunter (coming from A Most Violent Year‘s J.C. Chandor of all filmmakers), one of the several villains (I won’t specify which) delivers a hilariously eccentric line reading of “Get to the part where I should give a shit,” which sums the experience up. It’s hard to be convinced that Sony is instructing these filmmakers to try capturing something that resembles competent storytelling, compelling conflict, and human-sounding dialogue. However, chasing insanity isn’t necessarily working for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (now seemingly dead, and going out with a whimper here); these films don’t make an impression beyond stunning stupidity, intentional or not.
That line especially sticks out since, for a film with magical potions (from underdeveloped minority characters serving the arc of a white hero nonetheless), a comically over-the-top punishing father played by Russell Crowe putting on a Russian accent and dialect that makes him come across like a Simpsons “in Russia, car drives you!” meme come to life, a human who has undergone a procedure for hardened rhinoceros skin rendering him impervious to bullets, and a time-stopping gifted assassin, Kraven the Hunter is an interminable slog that no amount of gratuitously entertaining R-rated violence can elevate.
It begins in medias res with a prison break-in and subsequent hit, presumably because the filmmakers (the script comes from Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway) know that the childhood origin story to the actual origin story unfolding is also quite boring, filled with setup for a plot containing an excessive amount of characters, most of them villains, working across elaborate schemes and betrayals that don’t register, mainly because it’s unclear what anyone actually wants, other than vague gestures of power and control over mysterious businesses. Yes, I could go to Wikipedia and research more about the Kraven bloodline and family business since the movie isn’t concerned with making it clear what any of these people are running, doing, and what they want, but why the hell should I do the work for the filmmakers?
What can be gathered is that Sergei Kravinoff’s (Levi Miller as a teenager, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the adult antihero alter ego Kraven) hunting-obsessed father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) is heartless, asserting that he and his half-brother Dmitri’s (Billy Barratt as a young child, Fred Hechinger in the present day) mom took her life because she was mentally ill; it had nothing to do with him being a ruthless monster. Nikolai doesn’t want his boys to grow up weak or let America make them soft, so he instills hunting into them, proclaiming that one becomes a legend from killing notable beasts. Dmitri doesn’t exactly approve of this, but he is a pushover with loyalty to his father, even if he struggles to live up to such vile masculinity. Meanwhile, Sergei questions the fairness of using firearms while expressing an objection to the poaching period.
This probably makes Kraven the Hunter sound on the right track to tensely exploring toxic family dynamics and perhaps the general consequences of hunting animals for sport. Still, it’s also shockingly quick to do away with those themes in favor of several other subplots overstuffed with ability-enhanced characters. One doesn’t expect realism in a story about a boy mauled by a lion who is then discovered and given a magic potion by Ariana DeBose’s mystical Calypso, which not only miraculously heals his inner wounds but gives him animalistic traits, including the ability to catlike scale walls as if it’s all a parkour performance, but it’s reasonable to expect something to engage with and care about among the absurdity.
From there, Sergei runs away from home and apparently becomes Kraven over the years, protecting a personal piece of land shared with his beloved mother and murdering any poachers who stumble into the area. Meanwhile, Calypso has become a lawyer by day, with Kraven reuniting with her and looking to strike up a beneficial partnership; she provides him the locations of targets the law struggles to punish, and he kills them. That is also not a flawed premise, but again, so many generically motivated villains and ridiculous plot swerves come into play that it’s as if Sony or the filmmakers knew they were only going to get to make one of these, so they decided to cram three movies into one.
Although the film constantly throws Kraven from location to location with all the grace of whiplash or a video game abruptly jumping to the next level with only a 30-second cut scene in between, there is a healthy amount of bloody violence here. Such action sequences are poorly edited together with a distractingly high amount of cuts and typically never feel like they have gotten underway before they are over, but at the very least, the filmmakers understand this should be a graphic affair that doesn’t hold back on colorful stabbings. Similarly, the animal CGI leaves much to be desired (one wonders if Disney chose to release Mufasa a week after this under the impression that the quality can only go up from here), often leaving Aaron Taylor-Johnson looking ridiculous, such as an interaction showing that he can wrestle a lion to the ground, demonstrating a playful bond.
The issue is that the above craziness is stuck inside exhaustively formulaic plotting. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is not only a dud in the lead role but also has a good chunk of screen time taken away from competing villains that range from his aforementioned father, Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino, and Christopher Abbott’s time-bending hitman The Foreigner, all of whom are incomplete characters. Nothing is interesting to note about them other than that their allegiances consistently shift, spinning the wheels of incomprehensible storytelling aside from being able to tell who viewers should be rooting for. Viewers should also crave more from Kraven the Hunter. Hunt for better movies.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com