Overview
Kraven Kravinoff's complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai, starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
After the death of their mother, Sergei Kravinoff and his half brother Dmitri Smerdyakov are raised by their father, Nikolai, a fierce hunter and drug trafficking overlord. Their father pushes the boys to be cold and dangerous hunters, but his actions push Sergei further away from him, whilst Dmitri’s timid nature is always an embarrassment to his father. When Sergei is mauled by a lion on a hunt, close to death he is saved by the timely arrival of a girl named Calypso who heals him with a serum, which grants him animalistic abilities. Once healed, Sergei breaks free from his father’s control and over the years becomes known as a mysterious hunter of criminals named Kraven.
Sony’s SSU entries have been plagued from the start with the idea of taking a character from the comics that is linked to Spider-Man, and give them their own story with the aim of bringing them together at some point. This all kind of began when Amazing Spider-Man 2 teased a Sinister Six that never happened, but Sony ploughed on anyway but in a different route. Venom was a financial success, albeit not a critical one, which bolstered the studio’s confidence, resulting in two sequels, and the ungodly messes that were Madame Web and Morbius. The Kraven film, reportedly the final attempt by the studio to build this universe, ends the run of films with a bloody limp rather than a determined fury.
Aaron Taylor Johnson, it has to be said, would be a great Kraven in a different film. His physicality and delivery offers the only really good element to the film. To be fair, Russell Crowe as Nikolai is pretty good, in that over-the-top manner that the actor is delivering these days (clearly having the time of his life at present). However, the cast around the pair are underdeveloped and sap any life out of scenes. Ariana DeBose is woeful as Calypso, a character from the comics who is so hamfistedly inserted in here that you get the impression she was an afterthought. Fred Herchinger is so flat and annoying whenever he’s present that you swiftly understand why his father hates him. As for Alessandro Nivola as the central villain Aleksei, he offers zero menace throughout, and when he transforms into Rhino in the last act it is just laughably bad, and not just because of the dubious CGI on display.
The dialogue is cheap and flat for the most part, with huge exposition dumps inserted in clumsily, and repetitive reference to other characters in an attempt to world build. None of this is aided by some of the worst ADR glimpsed on film, making it seem like entire chunks of dialogue were hastily inserted over scenes to over-explain contrivances the plot makes.
Look, this is a mess, and it isn’t even one of those, “so bad it can be enjoyed with drinks to poke fun at it” kind of mess (you know, like Morbius) as it takes itself far too seriously. Aaron Taylor Johnson is so much better than this film, and deserves another shot at this character at some point, but hopefully done right by actually having him be a villain pitted against Spider-Man. As it stands, Kraven is the last sputtering gasp of a dying horse that has been beaten so much that not even a super-serum could save it.