Farewell, Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man universe. You died like you lived: strange and sloppy. A recent report, published in The Wrap, claimed that the long-delayed Kraven the Hunter will be the final attempt to launch a franchise based entirely around the webbed hero’s gallery of nemeses, now that Tom Hardy has departed the somewhat successful, and occasionally charming, Venom films. Morbius (2022) and Madame Web (2024), meanwhile, bombed at the box office, while seeming to incite their own kind of delirious, widespread hysteria.
Kraven the Hunter is packed to the rafters with the kind of bizarre sights we’ve come to expect from Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (or the SSU): Aaron Taylor-Johnson, shoeless and feral as our titular hero, running around London on all fours and (literally) climbing up the walls; Russell Crowe in a tiny scarf with a Boris-and-Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle-level Russian accent; a CGI bison with the meanest mug you’ve ever seen.
Yet at the helm this time is JC Chandor, a director with a strong back catalogue of dramas – Margin Call (2011), All is Lost (2013), A Most Violent Year (2014), Triple Frontier (2019) – all about the extremes people will go to for the sake of self-preservation. Kraven the Hunter is the most actively frustrating of the SSU films because you can see the kind of movie Chandor was trying to make. It seems to desperately wriggle up to the surface every once in a while, only to be beaten down by demands to add in 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 himself and his half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, accomplished in the realm of sad and snivelling, as already proven by Gladiator II), from under the malevolent influence of their mobster father, Nikolai (Crowe). This is a simple but sturdy story, then, about whether we’re destined to become our parents, or whether it’s possible to free ourselves from circumstance.
Not so fast! Dmitri has a natural gift for mimicry, and tries to win his father’s love by opening a club where he can perform uncanny covers of Harry Styles and Tony Bennett (Crowe nails the line, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like Tony Bennett”). Sergei – and it takes an egregiously long flashback to explain this – was victim to an unfortunate lion-related incident which left him with big cat blood in his veins, having been resuscitated by Vodou magic wielded by a younger version of Ariana DeBose’s Calypso (later, she reenters the story as an investigative lawyer). He now always lands on his feet, smells even the faintest smell, and has eyes with telescopic zoom capabilities. Taylor-Johnson lets his single cocked eyebrow do most of the work.
There’s a power vacuum in the mob that Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) attempts to fill. We’re introduced to him with an emo fringe and a nameless “condition” – years later he turns up with a skin-hardening treatment that turns him into a human-rhino hybrid (and a real eyesore, one of the worst-looking villains in recent memory). Nivola, having presumably identified how silly this all is, cranks it up to the maximum. In reaction to bad news, he hisses like a snake, despite telling us – again and again and again – that he is, in fact, The Rhino. Christopher Abbott plays an assassin called The Foreigner, who looks cool and seems cool, but is seemingly banned from appearing for more than a minute at a time. He’s mad 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 much-reported R-rating in the US means this is bloodier than usual). But Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes. Requiescat in pace, Sony’s Marvel universe – you really made people’s brains hurt.
Dir: JC Chandor. Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Russell Crowe. Cert 15, 127 mins.
‘Kraven the Hunter’ is in cinemas from 13 August
