It didn’t occur to me until I sat down to write this, but Kraven the Hunter is the third Sony Spider-Man Universe movie of 2024. Madame Web came out in February, and Venom: The Last Dance dropped in October. Kraven is probably the best entry in the SSU that doesn’t feature Venom, but that’s hardly a trophy worth mounting. In its best moments, it’s a serviceable R-rated action film. In its worst, it’s a miserable slog that can’t catch whatever it’s hunting.
Director J. C. Chandor is a slightly bizarre choice for this film. His first two outings, Margin Call and All is Lost, are tight, focused dramas about people in crisis. Both earned a ton of positive attention and several awards. In 2015, he replaced Kathryn Bigelow as the director of Triple Frontier, which finally dropped on Netflix in 2019. He closed a deal with Sony this year, guaranteeing funding for his next drama film. I wonder if his work on Kraven was a contractual obligation, forcing him to bring this mess to theaters before he could return to his wheelhouse.
A Long Hunt Without Good Prey
Image Source: Sony
Marvel and Sony have tried to shove Kraven the Hunter into nearly a dozen projects before they finally finished his movie. Sam Raimi wanted him for his fourth Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 teased him, and Ryan Coogler imagined him in Black Panther. No Way Home eventually replaced a theoretical MCU offering that would see Tom Holland fight Kraven. Sony stayed firm in their desire to give Sergei Kravinoff a solo project. He’s certainly a better prospect for blockbuster success than Madame Web or El Muerto, but he’s still a Spider-Man villain first and foremost. This pitch probably could have worked as a John Wick-esque murder ballet with a straightforward narrative. The film captures that vibe intermittently, but it just has to shove a pile of terrible lore and several awful recreations of Marvel characters into a film about a hunter who kills poachers and criminals.
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That last sentence was a solid plot summary, but I’ll get into the details. Sergei Kravinoff is the eldest son of ruthless crime boss Nikolai. He suffers a lion attack while on an unwilling hunt with his dad. Luckily, a young lady named Calypso inherits vaguely Voodou-coded potioncraft from her grandmother while on safari in the area. Calypso doses Sergei with the mysterious tincture, saving his life and granting him animal-adjacent superpowers. Sergei quickly leaves home, abandoning his sensitive half-brother Dmitri to his father’s abuse, and forges a new life in the jungle. At some point, he makes up the name “Kraven the Hunter” and starts killing dudes who do the same kind of evil as his dad. This eventually draws him to New York to reconvene with Calypso and Dmitri and face a new crime boss called the Rhino. It’s generic, boring, and full of holes.
Using Every Part of the Kill
Image Source: Sony
On the lowest possible level, Kraven the Hunter has some fun action sequences. Kraven sort of moves like an animal, but I’d honestly compare him to a knife-wielding Tarzan before anything else. This comes as part of a rebrand of the character, which sees him act as a violent conservationist and defender of animals. Eagle-eyed fans will recognize that as the opposite of his usual routine, but they needed the man to be somewhat sympathetic. As for his powers, he has the usual superhuman suite along with heightened perception and a loose connection with animals. Sometimes the creatures of the jungle immediately bend to his will, and other times they fight him until he can wrestle them into grudging compliance. His fight sequences are mostly knife-based. The R-rating is enough to spice up the fights, but it still pales in comparison to a Deadpool movie.
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You could enjoy this as a brainless R-rated reverse slasher movie. It walks right up to the thing John Wick does, using the villains’ reactions to frame the protagonist as a nightmarish threat. That never quite works out, but you could see a version of the script that pulled it off. Instead, like most of the Sony Spider-Man Universe movies, Kraven has to bend over backwards to turn the hunter into a hero. He lands somewhere between The Punisher and Deadpool in terms of moral complexity. The film would have worked a lot better if Kraven was a straight-up villain. He’s almost always doing bad stuff to avenge innocent animals or save his half-brother. They could have just killed a lion he was particularly fond of, let him take his list to New York, and watched him butcher his foes, but that wouldn’t have left room for enough cameos.
There’s More to Life Than Hunting
Image Source: Sony
The action sequences are the high point of the film, and they’re still well short of their best competitors. Kraven the Hunter also has some of the worst editing I’ve seen since Suicide Squad. Characters teleport around wildly, shots are either boring or incomprehensible, and every dialogue sequence follows alien pacing. Those editing concerns really show through in dialogue exchanges, almost all of which are shot to allow for copious ADR. People accurately took Madame Web to task for its abuse of voiceover, but Kraven has put a Band-Aid over that issue. The audience can’t notice ADR if the camera almost never films anyone’s mouth. So many of the creative decisions in this movie feel like Band-Aid solutions for obvious problems.
Related: Madame Web Hit a Record in the Worst Possible Way for Sony
Sony turned Kraven the Hunter into a conservationist because audiences wouldn’t celebrate a big-game hunter. They turned Calypso into an idealistic lawyer because the Voudoo priestess stuff hasn’t aged well. They invented Sergei’s abusive dad to grant him a reasonable motivation. The Rhino gets an upgrade to give Kraven a suitable target to hunt. Dmitri’s superpower is ADR. There are so many weird, funny elements that make this movie charmingly unhinged. It’s one semi-competent element struggling to escape the net trap of interwoven failures of every other storytelling decision. It’s all blisteringly obvious, both in the narrative structure and the grim behind-the-scenes calculus.
We all knew this wouldn’t work out the moment we heard the announcement. Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is a lost cause, but this is its best non-Venom entry. It’s not an incomprehensible mess like Madame Web or a complete waste like Morbius. I can see some people genuinely enjoying this film as one of a thousand violent action films. It’s still pretty unintentionally hilarious for those who loved laughing at the other SSU offerings. If this is Sony’s last hunt, it’s a rather dull send-off. A slightly better film feels like such a lame ending. Do you think we could convince them to try again, like we pushed them to bring Morbius back? Maybe Kraven 2 could be the worst film of all time we’ve been hunting for.
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