When you build a film around an action star (Jason Statham, say), he’ll do a lot of things that only happen in the movies: lay waste to five goons with his bare hands in two minutes, drive vehicles at dizzying speeds down the ancient staircases of a European metropolis, leap from balconies and hang from the rudders of buzz-diving helicopters. When you think about it, he’s a lot like a superhero, except that his actions are all, in theory, reality-based.
Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), better known as “Kraven the Hunter,” does a lot of that stuff too, only he’s no “action hero.” He’s a Marvel character with a superhuman edge. Kraven made his first appearance in the comics in 1964 as an adversary of Spider-Man, and Spider-Man is the character whose abilities he most recalls. He can shimmy up the sides of buildings and plunge from them without getting scratched. In the film’s grabby opening sequence, he infiltrates a Siberian prison to assassinate a crime lord (which he does the old-fashioned way — by grabbing a tooth out of a saber-tooth-tiger trophy head and stabbing the baddie in the neck). He then escapes with a lot of leaping, slithering, bending of metal, and so forth.
Yet compared to the web-shooting, elastic-limbed Spider-Man, the Kraven we see in “Kraven the Hunter” has a fairly prosaic set of gifts. You might say that he’s halfway between Jason Statham and Spider-Man. And since, at a Statham movie, we can at least pretend that the hero isn’t supernaturally gifted — that he’s actually doing all this stuff the way James Bond does — he’s actually a lot more fun to watch. As a movie, “Kraven the Hunter” marks the beginning of the endgame for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, and you can just about feel that in the way Kraven’s minor enhanced abilities turn him into a generic comic-book bruiser.
J.C. Chandor, the director of “Kraven the Hunter,” started off making brainy human dramas with thriller elements (“All Is Lost,” “Margin Call”). In 2019, he directed the bad expensive action film “Triple Frontier” for Netflix, and “Kraven the Hunter” feels like his first bid for the popcorn Olympics. You get why Chandor chose it. Kraven, as played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in longish hair and a beard but not much else that really distinguishes him (he’s ripped! who isn’t?), is a rather antsy superhero (or, technically, supervillain), full of broodish angst. But the less polite way of putting it is that he seems like the third-tier superhero he is, just like Morbius or Madame Web. The action in “Kraven the Hunter” is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you.
Instead, we’re meant to be caught up in the world of Sergei’s backstory: his heartless gangster father (played, with a thick Russian accent, by Russell Crowe, who still knows how to own a scene), his mother’s suicide, his protective relationship with his soft kid brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger). And then there’s his conflict with a nemesis known as the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), who as a result of a lab experiment can grow an impenetrable hide and smash things — in other words, he’s a gloss on the Hulk the same way Kraven is a gloss on Spider-Man. The Rhino kidnaps Dimitri to lure Kraven into his lair, but it’s all a part of a grander deception. Nivola plays the Rhino with an Esperanto accent and a slightly nerdish grin of self-adoring menace; he’s as wily a scene-stealer as Crowe is.
The actor who doesn’t steal scenes is Aaron Taylor-Johnson. I’m always holding out for this dude, because I liked him in “Nocturnal Animals” and “Nowhere Boy” and “Savages,” and for a while he seemed to have the makings of a star: smooth good looks, air of erotic menace, elegant English authority. But despite the fact that he was recently (falsely) rumored to have won the role of James Bond, I’m starting to think that Taylor-Johnson lacks the X factor. In “Kraven the Hunter,” he does a fine job when he has to go running, running, running through the streets of London and hang onto the side of a speeding van. But the American accent he puts on hurts him, because it flattens his personality. There’s an endless scene where Sergei is talking on a bench with Calypso (Ariana DeBose), the lawyer who’s his corporate-world partner, and Taylor-Johnson gets buried under the expository dialogue. He should have figured out a way to spin it.
“Kraven the Hunter” is kind of an origin story, with an extended boyhood flashback to Africa (where Calypso saved Sergei’s life after he’d been mauled by a lion). Except that the Kraven we meet in the present day is already a “hunter.” He’s got a list. Full of names of bad guys. That he will hunt and kill. But who are they? Where did he get the list? It’s all sort of vague. Why does the climactic duel take place amid a stampede of water buffalo? For no good reason. I’ve seen much worse comic-book movies than “Kraven the Hunter,” but maybe the best way to sum up my feelings about the film is to confess that I didn’t stay to see if there’s a post-credits teaser. That’s a dereliction of duty, but it’s one I didn’t commit on purpose. I simply hadn’t bothered to think about it.
From Variety US