Craven the Humdrum
'Kraven the Hunter' is the latest, and apparently final, addition to Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man Cinematic Universe
Kraven the Hunter is the latest, and apparently final, addition to Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man Cinematic Universe™. In the comics, Kraven is traditionally a villain, a big Russian dude who’s physically enhanced by herbal potions and comes to New York to track and kill the most dangerous game: Spidey himself. In the movie, though, they’ve turned him into an anti-hero, the same way they did with the titular characters from Venom and Morbius (although those characters sometimes are anti-heroes in the comics, which I don’t think has ever been true of Kraven). So now he’s the son of a gangster who kills people that hurt animals, and also sometimes just regular criminals maybe?, I honestly wasn’t fully clear on the details.
Even though the movie establishes both of Kraven’s parents as being Russian, and even though the movie establishes that Kraven is educated as a young man in London, he speaks with an American accent. But he’s played a Brit, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and his Russian papa is played by an Australian, Russell Crowe. His brother, who also inexplicably has an American accent, is played by an American, Fred Hechinger (who is, distractingly, a dead ringer for former Spider-Man actor Tobey Maguire, although given the character’s powers of impersonation, maybe that’s supposed to be a good thing). Alessandro Nivola, who is also American, also plays a Russian, Aleksei Sytsevich, a.k.a. “the Rhino.” Ariana DeBose, who is also also American, plays Calypso, who’s Haitian in the comics but seems to be American here. Christopher Abbott, who is also also also American, plays a villainous character called the Foreigner, who, despite his moniker, does not seem to be foreign.
ANYWAY, these characters are brought together via a nosebleed-inducingly convoluted plot that blends elements of Batman Begins, Commando, and Crocodile Dundee II. I’d try to give some summary of that plot here, but I fear on paper it would sound funnier than it is, and I don’t wanna accidentally encourage anyone to see this garbage.
Suffice it to say, the problem with Kraven the Hunter isn’t that it’s bad - it’s that it isn’t bad enough. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this movie is fucking terrible. But Kraven the Hunter is insanely awful, not insane and awful, if that distinction makes sense. That special combination that makes you wonder if the filmmakers are humans or aliens desperately trying to imitate humans - that Madame Web magic, if you will - is largely absent. Kraven is more bad the way an ‘80s action movie is bad than bad the way someone with a head injury would make a movie bad. You don’t even get the jolt of schadenfreude Morbius gave us from knowing that it’s going to hurt Jared Leto’s career.
Kraven sometimes hints at the future camp classic it might’ve been, as when the hero dissects a henchman at the crotch using a tree branch, or when Russell Crowe inexplicably puts on a pink neckerchief for one scene. And, yes, there are plenty of stupid story points to savor, as when the villains track the hero to Siberia, say they’re gonna go to Siberia to get him and then show up in the middle of a decidedly not-Siberian jungle. But most of the time, it’s just boring. Even Crowe doing one of his patented mediocre accents can’t save this thing.
Nivola is the movie’s one saving grace, largely because he seems to be the only performer who both knows he’s in a terrible movie and is having fun regardless. There’s a scene where he’s looking out a window and he just kinda screeches non-verbally apropos of nothing, and it’s absolutely wonderful. If only the rest of the cast had brought such scenery-chewing joy to this dreck, it might have been watchable.
Kraven the Hunter comes from director J.C. Chandor, best known for low-key fare like All is Lost, that movie about Robert Redford being adrift at sea and alone. I can only imagine he agreed to do this either because he needed money or because Sony took his family hostage.
So pour one out for Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man Cinematic Universe™. With a total of six entries, it got further than Universal’s Dark Universe (one movie), about as far as the Legendary Monsterverse (five movies, two television shows, and at least one more movie on the way), almost half as far as the DCEU/Snyderverse (15 movies and a television show), and still nowhere near as far as the MCU (34 movies, a whole buncha TV shows, and still growing). At least we’ll always have Tom Hardy in a lobster tank.