Bland Kraven Competently Goes Through the Comic Book Antihero Motions
The good news about Sony’s latest attempt to transform one of its Spider-Man rogue’s gallery of villains, Kraven (the Hunter), into a viable cinematic antihero is that the finished film isn’t that bad. The problem is, it’s not that good either. This superpowered comic book origin story could easily be mistaken for the dictionary definition of “meh.”
Too competently made to be summarily dismissed yet much too rudimentarily paced, staged, and plotted to be consistently enjoyable, this R-rated spectacle instead is instantly forgettable. Honestly? I think that’s worse than if it had been an outright disaster. Maybe then there would have been something interesting to talk about.
Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the son of the notorious Russian-born gangster Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe). After being mauled by a giant African lion and saved by a mystical potion, teenage Sergei leaves home — and his half-brother Dmitri Smerdyakov (Fred Hechinger) — in the middle of the night, determined to be nothing like his deviously murderous father.
Fast-forward a little over a decade. The young man has reinvented himself as Kraven, aka The Hunter, a notorious assassin who patiently stalks and kills members of the criminal underworld. The saying is that once you are on his list, you only get off it when you’re dead.
This doesn’t sit well with a different Russian evildoer, Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), aka The Rhino. He kidnaps Dmitri, knowing Kraven will do whatever he has to to save baby bro’s life. This will make the hunter vulnerable to assassination himself, and Aleksei has the perfect weapon to do the deed: a trickster hitman known only as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).
The film also stars West Side Story Oscar winner Ariana DeBose as a lawyer Kraven enlists to aid him in tracking down the nastiest of the nasty. She’s also the one who anonymously fed him the tonic that saved his life back in Africa when they were teenagers. But DeBose has precious little to do other than to give Taylor-Johnson a never-ending series of stupefied looks, hint that she’s something of an archery protégé, and confidently strut down the streets of London and a frigid Russian forest as if making her way down a Paris catwalk. Saying she’s wasted is an obvious understatement.
But director J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year) is a solid filmmaker, and the same goes for the primary writer on the project, Richard Wenk (The Equalizer trilogy). Are there any surprises? No. But does it all still make sense, move reasonably well, and rarely insult the collective intelligence of the audience? On that front, the answer is a laudable yes.
As for the technical aspects, the CG effects augmenting the on-screen mayhem are a decidedly mixed bag: Nivola’s transformation into The Rhino and the subsequent motion-capture work is top-notch, while the rest often looks like excised footage from one of Sony’s second-tier PS5 video games. But Chandor refuses to let the technology overwhelm the action. He relies more upon the picture’s talented stunt team than any of the elements generated inside a computer. This is something I wholeheartedly applaud.
Alas, it’s not enough. The heart beating at the center of the narrative is made out of papier mâché, not muscle, tissue, and blood. Every emotion is melodramatically phoned in. There is no tension. Scenes of brotherly bonding go nowhere, and if there’s supposed to be a love story blossoming between Taylor-Johnson and DeBose, all involved forgot to provide the narrative pollination that could have helped it germinate. This is paint-by-numbers stuff, and while the finished product looks reasonably okay, it’s not as if anyone will be rushing to hang it up in the Louvre.
I’m unfamiliar with the comic book version of Kraven created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1967, but I do know he did not have superpowers. The man was just an extremely talented big-game hunter who stalked Spider-Man and considered him the ultimate prey. I know there are legal reasons between Sony and Marvel that didn’t allow for that story to be told, but it’s still hard not to imagine that scenario would have been far more interesting than the one showcased here.
Funnier still, Crowe’s performance is such that you can almost believe he’s in that version of Kraven the Hunter and not this one. This makes Nikolai the most interesting character in this whole darn thing. But it also means he’s in a very different film than everyone else, one I’d rather be watching, instead of the one I was stuck twiddling my thumbs through.
– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: 1½ (out of 4)
