Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson shambles through as Sergei Kravinoff, an apex predator in the same way a waterlogged alley cat is king of the neighborhood dump. You watch him prowl, or at least skulk—after all, even predators need some dignity—but the film stages his drama like a backyard cosplay where the budget and enthusiasm both ran off at intermission. Taylor-Johnson is a fine actor handed lines so trite they ought to come with a choking hazard warning. His internal conflict is so muddled that calling it Freudian would be an insult to neurologists and novelists everywhere.
Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) materializes as the sad afterthought of a studio note: “Give him a brother, make it tragic or at least distracting.” Hechinger’s performance is a marvel in itself, if only for the sheer commitment to dazed befuddlement—he’s the punchline to a joke the film forgot to tell. And Ariana DeBose as Calypso? She’s ushered in like a plot insurance policy, appearing and reappearing with the urgency of a broken smoke detector—always wailing, never urgent, always just a beat late for emotional impact.
The “plot,” such as it limps, is a stressed-out pinball ricocheting between faux-familial doom and secondhand supervillainy. Daddy issues abound—Russell Crowe, doing the career equivalent of wearing dark glasses on a subway, glowers as the patriarch who wants his son to hunt... drug dealers? Forget Greek tragedy: we’re in the queasy middle chapters of a daytime soap, only here everyone delivers their lines like they’re reading the minutes to a particularly awkward PTA meeting. Imagine “The Godfather” rewritten by the world’s most distracted TikTok influencer—you want to laugh, but you’re too busy paging through your own regrets.
Visually, “Kraven the Hunter” is a masterclass in the anti-art of underachievement. CGI lions snarl with the flat menace of Windows 98 clip-art, and Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino—good heavens, the Rhino!—stomps through with about as much terror as a man caught wearing footie pajamas at a gun show. The action comes and goes in disconnected flashes: inventive in spurts, but mostly a limb-lopping parade that, if it ever thrilled, must have done so for a different audience in a parallel universe, one with lower standards and an even lower attention span.
Let us not ignore the “themes”—oh, the merry mess of them. Legacy! Redemption! The search for meaning in a world that mistakes violence for growth! “Kraven the Hunter” wants, desperately, to be about something—it flails, drops lines about fathers and fates and moral predation, but each half-formed thesis drowns in a churn of redundancy. The script keeps grabbing the film by the collar and shouting, “Look! This matters!”—but nothing sticks because nobody on-screen seems to believe it, least of all the audience.
One might praise Taylor-Johnson for keeping a straight face as he chews through what passes for existential crisis; he deserves a medal (or, at minimum, hazard pay) for barely blinking through dialogue so wooden it might have termites. Occasionally he tears through a goon with balletic violence, and you glimpse the ghost of a movie that might have been—a lean, mean B-movie with a wicked glint in its eye. Alas, it’s quickly weighed down by the cement shoes of bloated mythology and production design sourced from the “discount haunted house” aisle.
What’s remarkable is the film’s allergy to its own possibilities. There isn’t a spark of play here, nothing like the big, baroque joys you find in real comic book decadence—no, this is an accidental parody, a film so busy reassuring us of its seriousness that it tips headlong into farce. If Sony’s “Spider-Man Universe” is a sinking ship, “Kraven the Hunter” is the deck chair that bites you as you go down.
Was there a meeting, somewhere, where these choices seemed inspired? Did no one in the room say, “Maybe don’t have the apex predator look like he’s just finished searching the house for a missing sock”? “Kraven the Hunter” is the cinematic equivalent of someone yelling “Release the beast!” and then producing a faint, apologetic meow.
Watching it, I felt less like an apex predator than like prey—hunted by indulgent CGI, pinned down by million-dollar monotony. The only way out is laughter, but not the kind that comes from joy; it’s the rueful, “how did I end up here?” kind. You stumble from the theater blinking, grateful only to see sunlight, swearing off wild animals and Russian accents for at least a fiscal quarter.
In the end, it’s not even memorably bad—not the invigorating, gleeful shambles of a true train wreck, but the exhausted farce of a franchise running on fumes. “Kraven the Hunter” is less a movie than a cautionary fable: a tale to remind us that in Hollywood, sometimes the predator is just the punchline—and sometimes, so are we.
