'Kraven the Hunter' Review: The Thrill of the Hunt is Lost in This Origin Story

Midway through the punishingly dull Kraven the Hunter, Ariana DeBose — playing a high-powered lawyer linked to a string of gangster killings who flees a team of hitmen in her London office and lands in Siberia — says with a straight face, "I don't like the feel of this at all." Not joking. The moment was definitely not supposed to be funny, but it makes you wish director J.C. Chandor and the writers had embraced the ridiculousness of this confused Marvel villain origin story with a little more winking comedy.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in 'Kraven the Hunter.' 

Sony Pictures

Instead, those indications of a so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure are a brief glimmer in an action thriller that pours a lot of blood but never increases the stakes or sparks enthusiasm. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, with his rock-hard abs, plays the main character with great physique and knife abilities, but he's too wooden to enjoy it. Overlong and punctuated with anticlimactic killings of one bad person after another, this appears to follow past entries in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, such as Morbius and Madame Web, to an early grave.

Originally slated for a January 2023 release, the picture has been pushed back three times — delays that do not appear to have been used to refine the bad CG work — and is now hoping to capitalize on Christmas counterprogramming traction.

Fanboys may be unexpected, but despite obligatory allusions to Marvel heritage and cameos by Spider-Man villains Rhino, the Foreigner, and the Chameleon, these foes aren't very exciting without Spider-Man. Just the fact that DeBose's character, Calypso, has evolved from a Spidey-baiting Haitian voodoo priestess with a zombie slave-trade sideline in the comics to a sleek attorney demonstrates how little life screenwriters Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway extract from the material.

After you remove the Spider-Man fixation, it's unclear what type of antihero Kraven is supposed to be. He's introduced (in an eight-minute opening scene uploaded online by Sony earlier this month) when a busload of fresh convicts arrives at a distant, snowbound jail to the stormy sounds of Basil Poledouris' Russian choral hymn, "Hymn to Red October," from a Sean Connery submarine film.

Kraven takes little time in demonstrating to the prison-yard heavies that he is not to be taken lightly. That gets him summoned to the office of mafia leader Seymon Chorney (Yuri Kolokolnikov), whom he murders with a saber tooth retrieved from the tiger rug on the floor. His amazing escape involves scaling up walls, bounding over roofs, and jumping from enormous heights with what appears to be animal agility rather than human power.

When the action jumps ahead 16 years to when Kraven, then known by his birth name, Sergei Kravinoff, and his half-brother Dmitri (played by Levi Miller and Billy Barratt as teenagers, respectively), are dragged out of school in New York by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe), we get to the heart of that physical prowess.

If you liked Crowe's awful accent in The Pope's Exorcist, he delivers another hit here as the Russian drug lord who abruptly informs his boys that their mother has died. "She took her own life." "She was weak." (He isn't big on pronouns or articles.)

Suicide rules out a church funeral, so Nikolai takes the lads big game hunting in Northern Ghana instead, because, well, why not? Sergei and Dmitri are accused of being soft and having to grow up. Nikolai aims to demonstrate how by killing a mythical lion that has avoided hunters for generations. "Man who kills legend becomes legend," he informs them, at least getting one of the verbs correct. But the confrontation does not go as planned, leaving Sergei severely wounded and nearly dead.

In Ghana, the young Calypso talks tarot with her mystic grandmother, who provides her a magical cure-all elixir that bestows extraordinary abilities and informs her when to use it. Naturally, Sergei is the lucky receiver. The medicine, along with a drop or two of lion's blood, revives him after he was declared dead. He awakens with dazzling amber lion eyes and acute senses.  

Alessandro Nivola plays Russian mercenary Aleksei Sytsevich, who gets some crazy thrills from the part but deserves better, as if the time-consuming setup wasn't enough. He warms up to Nikolai and suggests they become partners, but is angrily turned down, presumably because he is wearing Javier Bardem's old hair from No Country for Old Men. When he unplugs a tube pouring fluids into him from a little backpack, he reappears with a nicer haircut and a weird transformational talent. Good luck finding out how that works. 

Aleksei ultimately says that he agreed to genetic experiments with a New York professor called Miles Warren — Marvel fans may recognize him as the Jackal — and that a tenfold boost in power is worth the torture. The scientist is not shown in this clip, but you can guarantee he has at least one additional guinea pig waiting for a mutant makeover. Hint: Dmitri, subsequently played by Fred Hechinger, performs Black Sabbath's "Changes" in his posh London piano bar.

Back in the present, Kraven has a list of nasty people to murder, and Chorney is one of them. He seeks down Calypso and asks her to assist him find the fiends. Kraven also struggles with his remorse after abandoning Dmitri to his tyrannical father by fleeing rather than complying with the old man's request for him to take over the family crime operation. Dmitri, who has an extraordinary talent for mimicry, is yearning for poppa's favor but is unlikely to obtain it by owning a piano bar, even if Nikolai enjoys hearing him impersonate Tony Bennett. (I am not making this up.)

Aleksei turns into the Rhino, as the teaser indicated, and plans to murder Kraven and seize control of Nikolai's empire. "When a rhino sees his opportunity, he charges in and takes it," he jokes. That opportunity offers itself in the form of the little Dmitri, whose kidnapping serves as the ideal lure. Rhino employs Turkish tough man Ömer Aksoy (Murat Seven) and a mystery assassin known only as the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, wasted). The Foreigner has the capacity to vanish for seconds at a time, which is never explained.

Kraven is superhero-like because he has the speed of a cheetah, the power of a lion, and the elegance of a cat, allowing him to mount skyscrapers, chase down an airborne helicopter while dangling from a rope ladder, and blast his way into a bulletproof car at high speed by ripping off a door. He's also friendly enough with the animal realm to lead a stampeding bison herd. Taylor-Johnson performs many of his own stunts, but if you're under 40 and don't, you appear lazy. Blame Tom Cruise.

The action moves from the streets of London to a monastery outside Ankara and Kraven's Siberian taiga refuge, where Calypso uses her summer camp archery abilities with a crossbow. Despite the numerous smackdowns and high body count, the plot never gains speed. It has insufficient internal logic for such. Even ultimate confrontations, such as Kraven's with Nikolai, have no impact, and if there is sexual tension between Kraven and Calypso, I can't see it.

Chandor established himself as a versatile director with Margin Call, All Is Lost, and A Most Violent Year before directing the starry heist thriller Triple Frontier (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal), which reportedly drew massive viewership on Netflix but, like most streaming originals, left no cultural footprint. To be fair, no one deserves a big Marvel wage, but Chandor appears to be either out of his element or uninterested in this role.

The drab-looking, slow movie appears to exist only to build the basis for future editions in which overqualified performers such as DeBose and Hechinger may be given more to do and Kraven's vigilantism may have a clearer sense of purpose. Or, now that he has that Viking-chic fur-trimmed vest to strike the classic pose in, will he become more clearly villainous? But these are all enormous maybes in a film that doesn't exactly scream, "Sequel!"