Kraven the Hunter destroys any hope of redemption for Sony’s Spider-Man films

JC Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter is completely confusing, from its existence to its implementation. But that doesn’t make it fun to watch. In fact, it could be the most weightless Hollywood studio film of 2024, both physically and emotionally. Based on yet another arch-enemy of Spider-Man, it ties in Mrs. Web, Morbiusand the Venom trilogy in Sony’s bizarre attempt to get some kind of Spidey series or universe off the ground without Peter Parker himself.

In some cases this approach almost works; the Venom films became increasingly self-aware as Tom Hardy’s gonzo double role became part of their charm. But for a delightfully comedic villain like Kraven, a big game hunter whose entire ethos revolves around killing Spider-Man, separating him from his nemesis is a tall order, and a Chandor film is definitely not up for that .

Kraven starts out nice enough, with Kraven, aka Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), showing off some animal physical skills while executing a murder/jailbreak. His eyes glow, indicating some kind of underlying forces fueling his physicality. This premise should be all we need to have a good time. Instead, the film immediately slams on the brakes and goes into childhood flashback mode for about half an hour to set up some weak father-son dynamics and other plot threads.

Those elements of Kraven really don’t need that much groundwork – not when the characters on paper are so broad and cartoonish: animal-themed killers and the like, who literally interpret the film’s metaphors about food chains and apex predators in the world of business and organized crime. But Kraven‘s scenes are filled with dead air and stone-faced gloom, despite the occasional attempt at levity.

It’s a largely joyless affair, and Chandor can’t seem to decide on a dramatic or comedic tone, let alone a mix of the two. Taylor-Johnson is often ready to deliver lines that seem intended as catchphrases, but he does so with the determination of someone who loathes the material. Kraven is not a quipper hero, and neither is Taylor-Johnson. But then pretty much every actor in the cast is completely checked out. Rarely has a superhero film featured so many talented performers. But with such boring material, can you blame them?

Russell Crowe plays Russian gangster Nikolai Kravinoff, father of Sergei and his brother Dmitri. When the boys’ mother commits suicide (“She killed herself,” Nikolai rasps in his comical Hollywood Russian accent), he takes his sons on a hunting trip to Ghana to test their mettle.

At the same time (and perhaps nearby, though the film has little sense of physical space), a young American girl named Calypso visits her mystical grandmother, who hands her a potion with the power to revive someone who has been seriously injured. And that’s a good thing, because Sergei is mauled by a lion that he refuses to shoot. Calypso’s potion helps save his life, after repeated extreme close-ups of the lion’s blood mixing with his own.

While Sony’s villains gallery spinoffs never featured Spider-Man, they seem determined to have his greatest foes take his place in a variety of ways. In the comics, Kraven does consume a potion that gives him increased speed and strength, but he is never imbued with animal DNA or had animal powers like Spidey. (Kraven’s mutant child Alexei eventually takes up his mantle in the comics, so at least there’s that some precedent, although the film often gives the feeling that the writers are randomly pulling ideas out of a hat.)

On screen, the battle between father and son becomes so great that Sergei runs away from home, just as he begins to show vague powers, the film never quite comes together. He is strong and fast, and sometimes his eyes zoom in on objects from far away. (He’s more of a digital camera than an eagle.) He may also be able to physically communicate with animals or perhaps exert control over them in some way, but this is never entirely clear.

In the present, he hunts poachers in eastern Russia and gangsters in Europe, but the code he claims to adhere to seems completely fluid. He’s an animal lover who eats fish and wears fur, and he has no problem killing henchmen, although his moral dilemmas seem to kick in when he’s about to do the occasional headbutt. He is targeted for unknown reasons by a rival of his father, Aleksei Sytsevich, aka the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), which leads to his brother (played as an adult by Fred Hechinger) being kidnapped. That in turn leads Kraven to enlist the help of adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose), now a lawyer, who is also somehow involved.

The details don’t really matter. They all seem to have been inserted to nominally connect one chase scene to the next. Kraven often catches up to armed criminals, performs various amusing maneuvers – with the help of massless CGI – and kills them at close range, as the film takes away every instance of digital blood spurting from their jugular veins. There’s a cruelty to his methods that the editing seems determined to abrade. Worse, there’s nothing really driving the character other than the coincidence of his brother being kidnapped by the Rhino’s henchmen. (Dmitri isn’t an intended target, he’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Christopher Abbott appears looking bored murderer called the Foreignerwhose powers appear to be holding his opponents in place for three seconds as he steps gingerly to his left. Unfortunately, Hechinger has little to do other than get kidnapped. Dmitri occasionally does striking imitations of other people – that’s him Chameleon from Marvel Comicsafter all – but not only does this talent never play a role in the plot (seriously, never), it’s not really noticeable either. The trick is performed by having the actors Hechinger imitates re-record his lines in their own voices, creating an exact impression. But Kraven the Hunter is filled to the brim with noticeably bad ADR, so every character might as well be a ventriloquist.

The only actors who seem to care are DeBose, who overcompensates for her thankless, exposition-heavy role by saying every word like it’s the end of the world, and Nivola, who generally seems to be having fun. He even cackles while explaining his backstory, a condition that causes his skin to harden like armor. (Although he also inexplicably grows a rhino horn from his forehead.) Everyone else’s lack of on-screen effort would have at least been tolerable if scenes hadn’t lasted just a handful of seconds — just long enough for a joke. to fall flat – or last an eternity, as each bit of physical impact unfolds at a casual distance, without being amplified by any formalistic sound design. Whatever the reasons for the film’s many delays, it still plays like a rough cut.

It’s a chore to sit through, and this absolutely shouldn’t be the case when there’s such rich material to draw from. There’s nothing really driving this Kraven – neither obsession as in the comics, nor his father’s rejection, as evidenced in this story. Filmmaking never shows the operatic sense of pomp and circumstance that comes with the character. He’s not so much “Kraven the Hunter” as he is “Kraven the Sometimes Nice Guy,” as if Sony tried to turn him into their own White Panther (right down to the film’s title font), albeit without the grandeur.

Admittedly, the film actually gets one idea out of it Kraven’s last hunt (the seminal Kraven comic), but this comes in the form of Kraven hallucinating spiders. In the comic, this abstraction represents his obsession with Spider-Man – who doesn’t seem to exist in this universe. In the film it seems to have something to do with his mother’s fear of spiders, which is only diagnosed after his hallucination. Is arachnophobia hereditary? A coincidence? Or was some lingering Spidey reference ultimately edited out of this movie, leaving this remnant behind? Who knows? Given how it plays out, all of the above options seem equally likely.

This fleeting spin reference is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. But it also speaks to the haphazard editing of Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider films, and the half-hearted nature with which these characters and their material have been adapted to form a loose continuity. Nothing in the film seems to matter, from the internal lore to the strange sequels that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethos. The public has don’t care much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem so indifferent.

Kraven the Hunter debuts in theaters on December 13.