REVIEW: Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Movie Reviews

Kraven the Hunter isn’t a good movie, but it should bring with it a sense of relief. This is the last of Sony’s Spider-Verse that doesn’t have Spider-Man, a series of pointless films that feel like the definition of “product,” seemingly made to fill a release date in the hopes that people would remember a supporting Spider-Man character and be tricked into going to the theater. But the truth is that nothing else is much better right now, particularly in the superhero genre, so the movie you keep hoping will finally end can just as well be this as anything else. And that’s Kraven the Hunter: a soulless, inconsistent, poorly edited, mostly atrociously acted excuse to stretch a brand beyond its breaking point, just like all the rest at the moment.

When Sergei and Dmitri Kravinoff’s mother commits suicide, they leave their boarding school to live with their father, Nikolai, a powerful Russian gangster. After being mauled to near death by a lion while hunting, Sergei is revived by a magic potion given to him by a young girl named Calypso. Upon recovering, Sergei leaves his father and grows up to become Kraven the Hunter, an assassin ruthlessly making his way through a list of organized crime figures. But his vengeful hunt and his abiding love for his brother get him mixed up in a war between his father and a rival mob boss called the Rhino.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention that the potion gave Kraven superpowers. I probably forgot because the powers are ill-defined and make little sense; ostensibly, he moves and has the senses and reflexes of a variety of jungle animals, but he also has super strength and speed. How much super strength? It depends on what any particular scene needs. It works kind of like Captain America’s super strength in the MCU movies, except Cap had a sort of baseline that, while not exactly spelled out, was communicated well enough through the action that we understood he had limits and was vulnerable. Kraven is basically indestructible, and at no point does he seem vulnerable until almost the very end, and that’s through a deus ex machina to force in some tension. There are no stakes to the action in Kraven the Hunter, and the weird special effects and filming techniques used to shoot Kraven in action complement that because he always looks like a walking (or crawling) cartoon.

Not that there would be much to care about anyway because Kraven the Hunter fails to make any of the characters human, likable, or understandable. Kraven loves his brother, which is fine, but you never get a sense of how they relate to each other. Every scene they share is full of rote, stilted dialogue where each tells the other what he’s feeling, or how to feel, or what to think. The same is true of Kraven and Calysto, whom he looks up as an adult and enlists as an ally in his targeted assassination scheme. It’s unclear what these two are supposed to be to each other in the movie, and despite their meeting as children, they don’t seem to care about each other until the plot demands they do, to whatever degree. In fact, the plotting is so bad that it’s hard to understand what anyone cares about. Why is Kraven killing off gangsters? Your guess is as good as mine. I think he’s mad at his father, so he’s killing people who are like his father without actually targeting his father, which is pretty dumb but the best I can figure. Why does the Rhino hate Nikolai? Because years ago, Nikolai wouldn’t do business with him, and despite that Rhino now seems to be doing quite well for himself, he’s still pissed off a decade or so later. Riveting stuff, made all the more so when plots and even major characters are simply dropped, disappearing from the movie so it’ll look complex and twisty.

None of these flimsy plotlines or characters are propped up by the acting. Aaron Taylor-Johnson never gives Kraven any depth or displays much emotion; he’s just there to do some action scenes and deliver whatever lousy dialogue he’s given. Ariana DeBose is almost as bad as the cast of Madame Web, delivering each line with all the emotion of a child playing Peter Pan on the playground. Fred Hechinger, one of the evil twin emperors in Gladiator II, is weepy and whiny as Kraven’s brother, Dmitri, who functions more as a MacGuffin than a character. Alessandro Nivola is a walking joke as the Rhino, acting goofy and never feeling like an actual threat, ruining yet another potentially cool comic book villain. The one bright spot is Russell Crowe, who is seemingly the only cast member who’s actually putting forth effort (though I can’t really blame the rest for taking it easy on this one). He has some decent lines, and since he’s the only one who does, I wonder if it’s Crowe’s conviction and delivery that sell them more than the writing. Unsurprisingly, Kraven the Hunter wastes a great actor like Crowe in a relatively small role, but he’s much better here than he was in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Besides Russell Crowe, the bright spots in Kraven the Hunter are few and far between. It makes middling use of its R rating, with most of the violence still feeling fairly sanitized, but Kraven does have some good kills, particularly in a forest-set action sequence towards the end. Unfortunately, these are undermined by the editing, which keeps the hits coming so fast that you can barely keep track of them. A couple of quick moments where Kraven interacts with animals were interesting, and there should have been much more of this; it’s hard to know what’s going on because they’re glossed over. There are a few Easter eggs as well, some of which work better than others. (One is so on-the-nose it reminds you of what this series of films should have been.) But in the end, there isn’t much to praise in Kraven the Hunter, and there’s nothing that would make me recommend you see the movie, even Russell Crowe.

Let us know what you thought of Kraven the Hunter in the comments!

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