Kraven the Hunter (2024)
But Kraven the Hunter is... an interesting one. With the character getting a significant amount of boost in the mainstream superhero fandom thanks to a stellar performance in the Insomniac video game Spider-Man 2, Kraven might just convince me that he might have the same star power as Venom. The origin story for Kraven sounds appealing enough as a standalone action movie flick, Aaron-Taylor Johnson seem to be a nice fit for the role of the character, and if nothing else, the movie should promise to be a simple action romp with some characterization instead of the ambitious but nonsensical plot that Madame Web was. Hell, like Venom, Kraven was even allowed to bring a bunch of side-characters from the comics that people might be familiar with. Rhino! Chameleon! These are far more interesting than the movie-original villain in Morbius, or the adapted-in-name-only Ezekiel Sims (who isn't even that popular of a character).
But the movie was just... really boring. There was some nice semblance of intrigue and character study early on, when the dynamics of the Kravinoff family was being established. The patriarch of the family, Nikolai Kravinoff (played by Russel Crowe!), is a drug-dealer who is extremely heavy on making his kids super-strong and super-tough and super-manly, even if it'll traumatize them. Sergei/Kraven eventually leaves his family despite being the brother who would please his father more, leaving his less-traditionally-masculine brother Dmitri at the mercy of their abusive father.
This is a very interesting setup... but not much is made out of that when we go back to the present day. There are some attempts to pay off the setup given to them, but other than Nikolai going "you're a disappointment of a son" several times, most of this just revolves around Dmitri being caught and held hostage by the villain throughout the movie. Sergei's confrontation with Nikolai -- who, shockers, is revealed to have orchestrated a huge chunk of the movie's plot -- is all right, but the huge betrayal moment of Dmitri as he reveals that he's turned evil and became the Chameleon because... uh... inferiority complex? He thinks Sergei is the same as his dad? It feels really abrupt and unearned.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson is quite fun in the lead role, even if Kraven the Hunter falls into yet another trap of 'superhero movie ashamed to be a superhero movie' by not letting Kraven dress up with his furry lion jacket until the end of the movie. But one crucial thing that makes a character like Kraven different from Venom or Morbius? Kraven was never a good guy in the comics. He had a code of honour, maybe, but for much of his tenure he was a villain -- and the main reason why he's remembered so fondly was due to the 'Last Hunt' story arc. Here, Kraven is reimagined as... something. He jumps from being an eco-vigilante that hunts poachers, but then also becomes a ripoff Green Arrow because he's hunting people from a list in a book, and he's also an assassin and a boogeyman in the underworld? And he alternates between being a badass 'I kill because it's the solution' anti-hero and spouting traditional heroic 'you're evil, I can't believe you're doing this' lines. Again, on paper, retooling Kraven the Hunter into an anti-hero -- as insipid as it is, considering Sony's track record -- isn't the worst thing out there. But it isn't even done well.
The origin story for Kraven is also hilariously ridiculous. There were memes that he was 'bitten by a radioactive lion' in derisive mockery... but that's actually not too far off from the truth. Young Sergei was mauled by a lion during a hunting trip led by his father, and the child of a local fortune teller feeds him some ambiguous never-explained-in-the-movie magic potion. Oh, and the lion's blood also falls into Sergei's open wounds. This combination of factors, plus a bunch of ridiculous projections of runes and totems, gives Sergei... very ambiguous powers. He has the far-sight of a hawk and can land on his feet like a cat, and... I guess all the typical enhanced agility and strength that any action movie protagonist have? It's really weird, and it would be something if all the mystery about the magical potion had any kind of significance in the final act, but other than the potion reappearing to be reused again, it's just brushed aside.
Speaking of which, Calypso is also kind of a character which the movie is really confused about. She's introduced as a rather tiresome trope -- the descendant of a local mystic, who grew up to be a lawyer... and... that's it, I guess? She helps Kraven find some information, and gets to hint that she might be hiding something interesting when she shows that she's good with a crossbow, but she's just there to fill in a supporting character quota and it really does feel like Calypso is juts there for Sergei to call just so that she can point him in a direction that advances the plot.
Our main villain is Rhino, who... I actually like this interpretation of. He's a skinny, nebbish dork who was insulted by Nikolai during the fateful safari hunt in the past. Come the present day, he's grown to be a crime lord himself, who thanks to the powers of genetic engineering, can harden his skin into that of a rhinoceros and later assumes a mutated-rhino-man form in the final battle. It's basically like Bane from Batman, which on paper, again, is an okay pragmatic adaptation.
The problem is, Rhino himself is just kind of there. His motivation is to stop the Hunter that's been taking out other criminals, and later on he just gets a happy hate-boner because Kraven turns out to be the son of the mafia boss that he really dislikes. Not the most interesting storyline, and I really do wonder if the movie could've benefited by having Rhino have a much closer enmity against the Kravnioffs, or even tie into the whole 'animal lover' plot by having his animal experimentations actually harm real rhinos, which this incarnation of Kraven should theoretically care more about. Hell, in an alternate universe where they keep Kraven as just a badass hunter instead of an ambiguous mystical superhuman, this would've been a nice 'raw talents of man versus genetically-enhanced abomination' or something. But instead we just get a very flat villain.
We also have another antagonist -- the Foreigner -- who can... hypnotize people and seem to move quickly. He shows up as an independent antagonist who's hunting Kraven for his own reasons -- avenging his dead master (which we never see!) -- before he ends up joining Rhino's organization. He really adds nothing to the story other than the brief hallucination where Kraven is attacked by spiders (oh god, he fights Spider-Man, which he'll never do because Sony won't commit!) and I really don't understand why he couldn't just be a minion of Rhino from the get-go, or be connected to Kraven's first victims, or to Calypso, or something.
It really is a shame because there was, with a lot of editing, a good story somewhere here. With better antagonists and a tightening of the 'mafia family' and 'hitman' themes, this could've been a more John Wick-esque movie. The action scenes are all right, too, for what little we had... nothing too spectacular, though, especially for a movie released in 2024 instead of 2004. Taylor-Johnson and Crowe are pretty great in their roles, but that storyline wasn't given really a good conclusion. It really is a shame -- this movie already needed help even before all of the real-world factors that it had against it as the final nail in the coffin for the SSU... but with all of it, it seems that poor Kraven is relegated to just this one hunt.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Kraven the Hunter/Sergei Kravinoff in the comics is introduced as an ambitious big-game hunter who seeks to defeat Spider-Man as his 'ultimate prey'. He operates through his own code of honour. His most notable storyline is Kraven's Last Hunt, where Kraven, who fears his age and mortality, finally defeats and buries Spider-Man in an induced coma while he goes off to hunt down a villain that Spider-Man can't defeat on his own. The story is often listed as one of the best storylines to focus on a previously one-note villain, giving him more depth than expected.
- Chameleon/Dmitri Smerdyakov, is the half-brother of Sergei. Eventually emigrating to the United States from Russia, Dmitri utilized his talents of impersonation to initially take the identity of Spider-Man. After his defeat, the Chameleon would menace Spider-Man and other heroes over the years.
- Calypso is a supporting character in Kraven stories, being a voodoo priestess and a confidant of Kraven that had magical capabilities. She was antagonistic of Spider-Man, and tends to use her powers to manipulate or bewitch other villains to fight for her.
- Rhino/Aleksei Systevich is a member of the Russian mafia who underwent a lot of experimental treatment that increased his strength and endurance. He would later be equipped with a powerful suit, and as the monstrous Rhino, would menace Spider-Man and the Hulk.
- The Foreigner is a minor Spider-Man villain who had extremely skilled physical capabilities. He's an assassin who was drawn in during a multi-faction gang war in New York, eventually working for and marrying Silver Sable.
- The doctor that gave Rhino and Chameleon powers is Dr. Miles Warren, better known in comic-book circles as the supervillain Jackal.
- The number of the prisoner Kraven murders is #0864, a reference to the date of the first comic book that Kraven debuted in -- The Amazing Spider-Man #15, released on August '64.
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