Review: Kraven the Hunter Is Weird Guys in Search of a Movie

The origin story of a Spider-Man antagonist that, for contractual reasons, will not mention Spider-Man. Photo: Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment/Everett Collection

Kraven the Hunter is a whole movie made up of weird guys (gender neutral) — but which guy is the weirdest? This became a matter of debate among some friends after seeing the latest installment of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, which, for contractual reasons, does not include or ever mention Spider-Man. There’s the title character himself, né Sergei Kravinoff, who is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a fang thong necklace, washboard abs, and the glower of someone who is right on the verge of delivering a monologue about the dangers of seed oils. Kraven is pretty, pretty weird! For one thing, the criminal underworld he’s been violently targeting has given him the nickname “the Hunter” because he hunts the most dangerous game — guys who remind him of his bad dad. And yet he, for reasons unknown, has given himself a secret nickname that sounds like the word for cowardly. For another, thanks to a mystical potion he was given as a teen, he’s super-strong and has super-senses and can clamber up walls as well as bound around on all fours like an animal, which looked hilarious when Liev Schreiber did it in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and isn’t any cooler here. But when it comes to being the weirdest guy, Kraven has serious competition.

Fred Hechinger, as his half-brother, Dmitri, is a nightclub-owning mimic who has the vague proportions of a Funko Pop, appearing to have been digitally shrunk down in some way so that he can look frailer than his brawny sib. Russell Crowe plays Sergei’s vodka-swigging daddy, Nikolai Kravinoff, a Russian gangster espousing a brand of masculinity so absurdly toxic that the first thing he barks to young Sergei after he dies for three minutes on the operating table after getting mauled by a lion is “WHY DID YOU NOT SHOOT?!” Christopher Abbott is an assassin named the Foreigner who dresses like he owns an art gallery in Geneva and has confusing powers involving counting. As Aleksei Sytsevich, a.k.a. the Rhino, one of Nikolai’s rivals, Alessandro Nivola does an even twitchier riff on what he did as Pollux Troy in Face/Off, at one point letting out a muted, prolonged shriek that no one acknowledges. That’s a lot of weirdness, and yet, I’d argue, none of it matches what Ariana DeBose is doing as Calypso, who as a kid gives Kraven the potion that activates whatever his deal is and as an adult stalks around a London law firm in intense geometric jewelry and assertive shoulder pads and is incapable of delivering a single sentence in a normal cadence — the way she says “moTHAfuckAAA” will haunt me forever.

There are worse things than a bunch of weird guys in search of a movie — like Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter’s precursor, which is so shambolic that it’s threatening to become an undeserving cult classic on the basis of its overwhelming ineptitude. Kraven the Hunter was directed by J. C. Chandor, who’s made a career out of handsome, genre-adjacent dramas like Margin Call and Triple Frontier, and who’s capable of turning out a decently lit shot, even if the CGI animals look egregious and the editing of the action isn’t always coherent. (In one fight scene, Kraven gets shot with a dart, and the film takes so long to cut away to the character responsible that it becomes downright avant-garde.) Chandor is, if anything, a little too classy for the likes of Kraven the Hunter, which has a tendency to drag in sections where it should be cutting loose. This is a movie about an extremely silly antihero who lives in a glass geodesic dome in Siberia, kills a bunch of people using a tooth he extracts from a head-on leopard-skin rug, and secures the respect of wild animals by flashing yellow eyes at them. Treating his family trauma with any gravity — by, say, diverging into a 20-minute flashback in the first act — is the kiss of death to whatever off-kilter momentum the movie manages to build.

To write about superhero movies is, almost inevitably these days, to end up writing at least as much about money as anything that actually ends up onscreen. The most telling extranarrative detail about Kraven the Hunter is that, after delaying it three times, Sony effectively took it out and preemptively Old Yellered it with a story in the Wrap about how the company was calling it quits on its weird nub of a non-Marvel Marvel cinematic universe, including a quote about how “sometimes that lack of quality meets a movie no one asked for.” “A movie no one asked for” isn’t criticism so much as a clear-eyed assessment of Kraven the Hunter’s fundamental issue: It’s based on a deep-cut comic-book character who isn’t recognizable enough to be a draw on his own, starring an actor of unreliable charisma who also isn’t a draw on his own and who’s frankly more fun in a supporting role as a priggish skeptic in Nosferatu than he is parkouring through London barefoot here. As a Spider-Man antagonist, Kraven would be an oddball addition to an established world, but as the focus of a whole movie, he’s like a decorative pillar suddenly tasked with holding up a house. Kraven the Hunter explores the inner workings of a guy we didn’t care about to begin with, alongside underwhelming action sequences and a lot of scenery chewing. But all that weirdness isn’t for nothing — we’ll always have DeBose as Calypso solemnly declaring that after her grandmother died, she never saw the woman again, which is definitely the proper order of things.