Have you ever arrived at a New Year’s Eve party about 20 minutes or so after the ball has dropped? No matter if things are still raging or starting to break up, there’s a distinct sense that you missed something vital about the event, and that despite how much you or others may try, the air’s already been let out of the room. That’s the sad state currently faced by “Kraven the Hunter,” a movie that releases in theaters mere days after the announcement that the film marks the official end of Sony’s Marvel Universe.
This isn’t an instance of a movie being caught with its cinematic universe pants down, however; the end credits don’t feature a slew of teases for movies that will now never happen. It’s more quietly tragic then that the movie cuts to credits with no mid-credits scene, no post-credits scene, no nothing.
The real tragedy surrounding “Kraven the Hunter” isn’t that it promises a future that will never be, but that it could’ve allowed itself and the universe to which it belongs to go out with some dignity. Let’s be real: the Sony Marvel Universe is actually sequestered to one relatively small corner of the larger Marvel Universe, that being the characters exclusively from the “Spider-Man” books. Yes, that’s still a large number of characters on paper, but what producers at the studio seemingly failed to realize is that most of these characters were created for the express purpose of commenting on and bouncing off of the central character of Spider-Man.
Sure, a success like 2018’s “Venom” convinced them (and us) that a future filled with movies about Spidey’s B-tier supporting cast might be viable (and hey, they could all team up and/or meet Spidey himself someday, right?). Yet the two “Venom” sequels suffered from diminishing returns despite their charms, while “Morbius” flailed about for any relevance of its own, and “Madame Web” landed earlier this year with all the finesse of silent flatulence. The bar was already set pretty damn low for “Kraven.”
Of course, “Kraven the Hunter” does not clear that bar. The most frustrating aspect of the film is that it didn’t have to be this way. Ironically, the thing that hurts it the most is the thing that would’ve helped save the equally messy (and, I’d argue, more embarrassing) “Madame Web,” which is its connection to the “Spider-Man” mythos. Where the latter movie bizarrely tried to sever (or at least muddle) ties with the likes of Peter Parker, “Kraven” is hobbled by having to tell a gritty crime saga story while making sure Alessandro Nivola’s Aleksei transforms into an actual Rhino and Fred Hechinger’s Dmitri turns into a shape-shifter known as the Chameleon. Perhaps that’s a little unfair, however; after all, good spinoff films like “Venom” and “The Wolverine” were able to tell some pretty fun stories while retaining their comic book trappings and remaining in vague continuity with a larger narrative. The issue with “Madame Web” and now “Kraven the Hunter” is Sony’s relationship with the Marvel Studios’ universe and their shared Spider-Man. Even “Venom: The Last Dance” spent its early moments underlining how Tom Hardy’s Eddie was now back in the Sony-verse.
Perhaps, then, the old trick of smuggling a classic genre flick riff inside of a comic book movie is wearing thin. There’s a really decent action thriller hiding inside “Kraven the Hunter,” as it follows Sergei Kravinoff, played by Aaron-Taylor Johnson, traveling the world and using the animal-based super-powers he was inadvertently given as a teen to hunt down and take out kingpins of the criminal world. His assistant in this is Calypso, a woman who comes from a Voodoo-practicing family (and who gave Kraven that potion which gave him his powers), who now works as a high-powered lawyer, and can use her connections to help identity and find the men on Kraven’s list. This premise would make for a great one-hour action drama for TV in the 1980s, a combination of “The Equalizer” and “Manimal.” The vibe of the former show being in the film’s DNA is no accident, as co-writer Richard Wenk is the writer of the Antoine Fuqua/Denzel Washington “Equalizer” trilogy of films. The action bonafides for “Kraven” go further than that, too, as co-writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway worked on “Punisher: War Zone” and “Transformers: The Last Knight,” while director J.C. Chandor brought real grit to his 2014 ’70s homage, “A Most Violent Year” and 2019’s men-on-a-mission grunter “Triple Frontier.”
Sadly, “Kraven the Hunter” feels like it’s constantly being held back by whatever or whoever was holding the reins of the production. Even the ribald elements afforded by its R rating, usually an indicator of a comic book movie being allowed to go nuts, feels muted. There’s some gnarly violence on display, but every time an actor drops an F-bomb it feels like an outtake that’s been accidentally left in the final cut. Of course, true to comic book movie tradition, despite the rating, there’s no sex to be found. There’s not even love — Ariana DeBose’s Calypso seems to be continually saving Kraven’s life for reasons the movie never feels interested in explaining. That’s probably for the best, however, as “Kraven the Hunter” does far too much explaining, whether it’s a character delivering an oblique monologue about a magic potion, or Russell Crowe’s Nikolai constantly announcing his toxic masculinity to his sons.
The script, which was probably cobbled together via numerous rewrites over various reshoots and ADR sessions, never allows this fine cast of actors to convey their characters on their own, and instead stuffs their mouths full of vapid, needless dialogue. Poor Taylor-Johnson, who’s proven himself such a valuable supporting player in films from “Tenet” to this month’s “Nosferatu,” can’t seem to find a leading role worthy of his talent, and Kraven is no exception.
Fortunately, despite all of the debris surrounding it, there are occasionally glimpses of the weird, nasty, gritty thriller that it feels like Chandor wanted to make with “Kraven.” The action sequences have a real hands-on brutality to them, as opposed to most comic book films’ weightless punch-ups. Some of the cast — especially Hechinger, Nivola and Crowe — get to have a ball making their performances as odd as possible. Meanwhile, Christopher Abbott plays a man known as the Foreigner, an assassin who has the ability to hypnotize his targets, and he’s so charming and chilling in equal measure that it’s a shame he’s not on screen longer.
All of these elements keep “Kraven the Hunter” from being an ignoble slog, and only fuels the belief that there’s a better movie lurking somewhere beneath all the mess. While one easy answer as to how to avoid such a disappointment in the future is to have clearer line of sight when it comes to what type of movie you’re looking to make (and who you’re making it for), another is that maybe, just maybe, we give the comic book movie mill a rest for a while. The people yearn for variety; the filmmakers yearn to be free from IP, and to be allowed to make some genre cheese untethered to a cinematic universe.
As Kraven himself learns, keeping animals in captivity or hunting them for sport only dims their majesty. If we want cinema to thrive, we need to set it free.
