The movie is so vacuous, so bereft of life in spite of its many desperate and quality actors trying to quicken the cadaver with wasted energy, that it eerily resembles the cobbled together emptiness of the worst 2000s superhero time-wasters. Then again, Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman previously oversaw production on the lowest common denominator nerd baubles of yesteryear like X-Men Origins: Wolverine while producer Avi Arad was producer on train wrecks of that era like Elektra and Ghost Rider, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising Kraven the Hunter feels like a throwback to the days where “fan service” was something done through gritted teeth.
Handicapped from the jump due to the fact that there is only one great Spider-Man story with Kraven in it, and this is not it, Kraven the Hunter’s screenplay—credited to Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (whether they like it or not)—reimagines comicdom’s Great White Hunter into a superpowered eco terrorist. Maybe. He could also just be an assassin working for himself. It’s vague, and in the end it seems even Kraven is pretty uncommitted to whatever it is he’s doing in any given scene.
What we know for sure is that Sergei Kravinoff (Taylor-Johnson) was raised by an awful caricature of toxic masculinity, Papa Nikolai (Crowe), to be a tough killer. But after Sergei is mauled by a lion as a boy during an African safari, a nearby child of a “mystic” (so as to avoid troubling voodoo implications from the comics) conveniently appears to give young Kravinoff a magic potion that cures his injuries and gifts him with superpowers to boot. Sntached.
Afterward, he swears never to hunt again with anything more than his bare hands, and furthermore instead of animals he will track bad dudes like his papa, just not actually his papa. Even a bored, wasted Russell Crowe is too valuable a commodity to kill off in the first act. So now just “Kraven” grows up to be known in the press as The Hunter, a mysterious vigilante killing bad men all around the world. He’s also estranged from his father, protective of his weak younger brother Dimitri (Hechinger), and that rando fur enthusiast who turns up like a half-forgotten Tendr date who now wants brunch in the life of Calypso (DeBose). She was the convenient mystic child who saved his life on the savanna, and now she’s grown up to be the conveniently high-powered London attorney who can further advance the plot whenever needed.
Kraven will pinball in scenes between all these characters and more, including Nivola’s Rhino, a skinny crime lord (don’t worry, he gets bigger) and the Rhino’s right hand man (Christopher Abbott’s the Foreigner, faintly registering as present on the supervillain roll call). Together, those two hatch a scheme to turn Kraven’s predator into prey for… reasons. Bwahahaha.
There is obviously a lot of plot at work in Kraven the Hunter, and all of it appears derivative from other, better films. While the movie has made noise in the press over the fact that this is Sony’s first R-rated picture based on a superhero comic book, it resembles more John Wick in tone and temperament than the goofy gorefest of the Deadpool flicks. Perhaps it even has some hope of emulating the dramatic heft that James Mangold imbued the Wolverine character many years after X-Men Origins: Wolverine when the director stripped the character down to his acoustic fundamentals in Logan.