Kraven the Hunter is yet another forgettable Sony superhero misfire
This has been a big (read: long) year for Sony Spider-Man offshoots. The year began with the meme-friendly Madame Web, and continued with a lackluster third entry in the Venom trilogy.
The latest (and hopefully last) outing in this experiment in intellectual property ownership, director J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter, is one of the better entries, but that’s not saying much.
After the sudden death of his mother, teenager Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller) and his half-brother Dimitri (Billy Barratt) are whisked away to Ghana by their Russian crime lord father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). Sensing weakness in his spawn, Nikolai feels a hunt is the best thing to teach them how to be men. Unfortunately, during said hunt Sergei is mauled and dragged off by a ferocious lion. Oops.
On the brink of death, he’s miraculously saved by the strange intervention of Calypso, a girl who just happens to have received a mystical serum earlier that day. The liquid saves Sergei, but also fundamentally alters him, giving the agility and strength of numerous animals.
Confounded by his transformation, Sergei abandons his family to figure out where he fits in the world.
The synopsis above would make sense as an opening, or even an extended flashback, but that’s not what happens here. Screenwriters Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway start their story with the adult Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), now dubbed “Kraven,” assassinating a guy before jumping back 16 years in the past for the origin story, then hurtling back to the present, all in the space of 20 dizzying minutes. It feels like entire scenes have been excised that could have helped the flow of the narrative.
All the time jumping and location hopping eventually forms into a better second half, as if a different editor was allowed in the bay. Unfortunately, even that isn’t enough to fix a cold, illogical script that feels like it was engineered by AI. 
Anyway, Taylor-Jonson’s Kraven is named “The Hunter” by underworld folk because of his superpowers, and his personal code that sees him taking down the worst criminals the world has to offer. A power-hungry former underling of Nikolai’s, Aleksei Systevich (Alessandro Nivola), has Kraven in his crosshairs as part of a power-grabbing scheme. This turns into an adventure involving globe-trotting, double-crossing, kidnapping and your typical comic book shenanigans.
You can feel the movie being stretched between two masters like a bearskin being prepped for life as a rug. The studio has notes that they “think” they will make a profitable film. Meanwhile, Chandor—who usually writes his own scripts but here is working with one from three different writers—tries to wrangle the best material he can out of what he’s given. Chandor is successful when focusing on the familial and gangster aspects of the story when he can take small character moments and let his actors interact nearly naturally before someone turns into a humanoid rhino for “comic book reasons.”
It’s hard not to feel bad for Chandor, given his mostly solid track record (Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier). It’s also tempting to feel some sympathy for the stacked cast, which includes Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, and Christopher Abbott in thankless roles. Because they’re talented, these performers manage to inject enough life into the proceedings that again suggest a better version of this movie than this one exists on the cutting room floor. Too bad that’s not the one we got.
