Kraven the Hunter (now on Netflix) was the third movie in the SSSU (Sigh: Sony Spider-Man Universe) to be released in 2024, and possibly the last movie ever. To be released. In that universe. Although sometimes it does feel like these movies are the last movies EVER ever. And to say it’s the best of the franchise is probably true, although that’s akin to declaring it the least stinky lump in the litter box. Aaron Taylor-Johnson headlines, capping off a fine 2024 for him (see: Nosferatu, The Fall Guy) by playing the world’s greatest hunter who’s destined to become a Spider-Man adversary – although one must remember that the Sigh in SSSU is there because SPIDER-MAN NEVER APPEARS IN THE SONY SPIDER-MAN UNIVERSE. This is possibly the stupidest franchise in cinema history for that reason alone, and its every movie plays like nobody who made them gives the slightest bit of a damn about any of it. But hey, Kraven gives a tiny bit more of a less of a damn about it, for what it’s worth. Not that it’s necessarily a constructive way to use your limited time on this earth, mind you.
The Gist: We meet Sergei Kravinoff, a.k.a. Kraven the Hunter (Taylor-Johnson), on a prison transport to a Siberian gulag. He’s barely settled into his cozy cell with a homunculus roommate before he finds his way to an incarcerated crime kingpin and uses his superhuman strength, agility and speed to murder him and his cronies. Then Kraven stages an escape that involves running directly into a blizzard, because that don’t bother him at all, and also because it allows his eyes to glow golden amidst the winter maelstrom, in a rather dramatic manner. He hops into a plane waiting for him and makes it home to his way-off-the-grid home deep in the Russian wilderness, where he reaches the eight-minute mark of the movie and takes his shirt off, a moment that seems overdue, inevitable and of course vainglorious, because, y’know, hey, congrats on the impenetrable abs and uberswole bis, Aaron.
How did Kraven get this way, you may be asking, besides the steroid injections, that is? Jump to 16 YEARS EARLIER, when he was played by Levi Miller. Sergei-who’s-not-yet-Kraven and his younger brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt) exist under the crushing and abysmal parentage of their psychologically abusive gangster-oligarch father Nikolai (Russell Crowe), whose only goal is to make all-caps MEN out of his sons. He speaks in clipped English: “She took own life,” he says, catching the boys up on the state of their mother. So it goes. Then he takes them hunting in Africa, where Sergei is mauled by a lion the size of a Yugo, and what with one thing (the lion’s blood drips into Sergei’s wound) and another (a young woman named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) feeds him some life-saving voodoo serum), he awakens in the hospital, three minutes after being declared dead, as a guy who can do some things, although what those things are exactly is never made clear. He runs fast enough to catch a moving truck, has a way with knives and machetes and crossbows, is rather strong, apparently can Doolittle with some animals (sometimes, but not always, apparently?) and can climb buildings and jump around with ease, Spider-manning around like He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Franchise.
Back in the present, things start happening – too many things for any plot to safely contain. His pop still throws his weight around in the criminal world. Dmitri is now played by Fred Hechinger, and is a willowy flimsybody in a turtleneck who can mimic anyone’s voice and sings like Harry Styles, Ozzy Osbourne (!) and others as part of his lounge act. Nikolai’s rivals kidnap Dmitri for ransom, and Kraven consults the adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who’s now a high-powered lawyer in London, to help him find the kidnappers. All this mucking-about involves Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a big-time crook who has his own superpowers which, hey, no spoilers here, pal. Aleksei crams one more character into this mess by hiring The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), an assassin with mind-control powers, to kill Kraven. Violence ensues, because why wouldn’t it? Problems never get solved without it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: With Kraven apparently (but not yet officially) the last film in the Sigh SSU, here’s THEE definitive worst-to-best ranking of all six movies in the series:
6. Morbius – Where most movies in this franchise are amusingly baffling, this one’s just boring.
5. Madame Web – Pepsi-Cola presents Dakota Johnson as the very confused star of this laughable-but-not-laughable-enough-to-recommend mess.
4. Venom: Let There Be Carnage – Sorry, all the Venoms blend together for me. This one was slightly more obnoxious than the others, if memory serves.
3. Venom – Noisy and idiotic, this set the precedent for all the movies in the franchise by being just watchable enough, yet still deeply annoying.
2. Venom: The Last Dance – I used to think Tom Hardy was one of the best actors in the biz, then he tackled three junk-ass Venom movies.
1. Kraven the Hunter – Director JC Chandor shows the ability to slap together some garbage one-to-three smidgens better than all the other directors in the franchise. Pop the champagne!
Performance Worth Watching: Default to Crowe because he brings a bit of gravitas to everything he does, even if he’s whipping out a crummy Rooshun ack-scent.
Memorable Dialogue: Calypso gets this pointy doozy of a one-liner: “I didn’t ask you to murder anyone. I’m a lawyer!”
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: The most compelling element of Kraven as a character is how he rummages around in the ethical junk drawer of vigilantes who don’t like people who do bad things (like poach wild animals or kidnap his brother), but needs to be reminded that murdering bad people makes you a bad person too. Not that the movie does anything interesting with this conundrum. Weirdly, Calypso, met with a proposition of an alliance with Kraven, questions his morals, but eventually just goes along with his kill-happy shenanigans, proving that this movie contains precisely zero nice people.
Calypso is so poorly defined – DeBose, who won an Oscar for West Side Story, is left unmoored by the listless screenplay – she could easily be left on the cutting room floor; is her magic potion necessary when Kraven’s already got blood of lion in his system? Probably not! Same goes for half the characters in this thing. So much of Kraven the Hunter feels completely disposable, suffering as it does from Too Many Characters Syndrome and a plot that lacks consequence – and continues to set up the Spider-Man rogue’s gallery that’ll never come to fruition in a movie, the cinematic equivalent of screaming into the vacuum of space.
Chandor, who should know better but surely hasn’t been paid better (previous films include the excellent dramas Margin Call and All is Lost), pieces together a fair amount of halfway-acceptable CG-riddled action spiked with R-rated mayhem, yet I still found myself fighting through a chronic case of the doze-offs. I chuckled a couple of times, during Young Kraven’s a-cat-always-lands-on-its-feet moment of discovery, his transformation into Cool Vest Guy (With Gauntlets) and the realization that he’s not only good at setting traps (e.g., bear, snare) but working them out too (e.g., lateral raises, dumbbell rows). Some people called this thing “bonkers,” but I’m convinced they inadvertently napped during the movie and dreamt something more enjoyable and narratively propulsive. Unlike all the other entries in this series, Kraven isn’t actively annoying, and frequently shows something at least remotely resembling storytelling and filmmaking competence. Hooray?
Our Call: If this is the end of the SSU, the sub-franchise went out on a high note – relatively speaking. But that doesn’t make Kraven worth watching, mind you. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
