Poor Kraven. The grand finale of Sony’s failed experiment gets us to the “dumpuary” part of the movie schedule a couple weeks early. What’s left of their “grand villain experiment” is a soulless, empty cash grab that didn’t even bother to have an end credits Easter Egg like Madame Web. Message received: hate to break it to you Kraven the Hunter, but Sony’s breaking up with you, and taking the spidey kids with them.
Not that it matters, but Kraven’s (Levi Miller) real name is Sergey Kravinoff. He’s the lone true heir to father Nikolai’s (Russell Crowe) crime empire, since Sergey’s half brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is too weak to lead it. After hunting in Africa, Sergey almost dies from a lion attack, but fear not, Calypso (Ariana DeBose) just happens to have one dose of a family super strength serum that she gives to the boy. He survives, and adult Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes into the underworld, ridding the planet of really bad people, eventually putting him on a collision course with Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), who has a score to settle with Nikolai.
That was too wordy, my bad. I should have just said “Kraven kills a bunch of bad guys.” The studio machine wants everyone dead by the end of this film so we can pretend this never happened. You can tell JC Chandor the director and the whole cast know it too, so they basically do the best they can to make themselves look good. We’ve got a more infuriating Megalopolis situation, where everyone is in their own movie, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson is modifying his performance to fit whatever scene he’s in. What the audience is left with is a series of disjointed sequences, loosely held together by a nonsense plot. The green screening is some of the worst of the year, and the dubbing is second worst only to Madame Web. Sounds like an IP megawinner to me! There’s exactly 2 moments that are fun. 1 is unintentional, when Alessandro Nivola for no reason let’s out a giant hiss at a table making me burst out laughing when I wasn’t supposed to. The 2nd is Ariana DeBose’s big moment, the best in the movie, which also got rid of the most interesting character in the movie so even that’s tainted. Kraven the Hunter is basically an AI generated film, as all artistic creativity has been sucked from its husk in service of profit margins.
So if Sony’s given up on Kraven the Hunter, you should too. Stay in and enjoy Christmastime with your families. There’s probably one silver lining though: this is the last bomb for Aaron Taylor-Johnson that is going to lead him directly to James Bond. He’s made for that 007 suit. If you want to see a better Kraven, just play the Spiderman 2 video game instead: that Kraven rocks and that story is legitimately excellent.