Director – J.C. Chandor, Screenplay – Art Marcum, Matt Holloway & Richard Wenk, Story – Richard Wenk, Producers – Avi Arad, David Householter & Matt Tolmach, Photography – Ben Davis, Music – Evgueni Galperine, Sacha Galperine & Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects Supervisor – Richard R. Hoover, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Dave Morley), Distillery VFX (Supervisor – Greg Kegel), DNeg, Framestore, Image Engine (Supervisors – Martyn Culpitt & Andy Walker), Lola | VFX (Supervisor – Cliff Welsh), MPC (Supervisor – Michele Alessi) & Rodeo FX (Supervisor – Sebastien Francoeur & Mai-Ling Oydo), Special Effects Supervisors – Andy Ryan & David Watkins, Production Design – Eve Stewart. Production Company – Columbia/TSG Entertainment/Marvel.
Cast
Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Sergei Kravinoff/Kraven the Hunter), Ariana DeBose (Calypso Ezili), Russell Crowe (Nikolai Krevinoff), Alessandro Nivola (Aleksei Systevich), Fred Hechinger (Dmitri Kravinoff), Christopher Abbott (The Foreigner), Yuri Kolokolnikov (Semyon Chorney), Levi Miller (Young Sergei), Diaana Babnicova (Young Calypso), Tom Reed (Bert), Murat Seven (Omer Ozdemir)
Plot
Sergei Kravinoff operates as Kraven the Hunter, a near mythic figure who eliminates international criminals. As a child, Sergei was taken on a hunting trip to Ghana by his father, the Russian gangster Nikolai Krevinoff, to help get over his mother’s death. In the wild, Sergei was attacked by a lion. Dying, he was found by Calypso Ezili, a visiting American child who had been introduced to the voodoo magic of her grandmother. Calypso used a potion to heal Sergei and left him with a tarot card. In the present-day, Kraven finds the adult Calypso, who has become a top lawyer in London, and explains who he is, suggesting an alliance to deal with bad people. At the same time, Kraven’s elimination of criminals has caught the attention of Aleksei Systevich, who seeks to consolidate control of the gangs. He comes determined to stop Kraven by targeting his younger brother Dmitri.
Marvel Comics have had massive success with their superhero films since the early 2000s, bringing them together on screen in an ongoing shared continuity (the Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU) in 2008. There have been several Marvel superhero films that predated the MCU. In fact, the whole Marvel boom was created by the huge success of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men (2000) and then Sony/Columbia’s Spider-Man (2002), directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire. Raimi and Maguire made Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007) and then bowed out. Sony attempted a reboot starring Andrew Garfield with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). These were less successful so Sony rebooted Spider-Man a third time with Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) starring Tom Holland at the same time as allowing Holland’s Spider-Man to cross over and appear in the MCU.
In the midst of this, Sony sought to leverage their hold on the Spider-Man copyright to create their own universe. They had reasonable success with Venom (2018) based on the Spider-Man villain and the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) featuring alternate versions of Spider-Man. Both of these spawned multiple sequels. Far less successful were Sony attempts to do the same with other Spider-Man characters with Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2024) and here Kraven the Hunter.
Kraven the Hunter first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #15 (1964). Kraven has always been a Super-Villain and has fought various other Marvel characters. He was even a founding member of The Secret Six. Clearly based on Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Kraven’s big thing is hunting human prey. He is usually depicted in comics as wearing leopard skin pants, vest with a fur collar over bare chest and with a mustache and soul patch. He was originally without powers but in later developments gained superhuman strength, endurance and invulnerability to damage.
The comic-book Kraven the Hunter
As with the Venom films and Morbius, Sony have taken a Marvel super-villain and rewritten them as a superhero. There is almost no resemblance between the comic-book Kraven and the film Kraven. Gone is his entire about being a big game hunter who enjoys hunting superheroes, where the character is now reconceived as vigilante who hunts criminals (along with an apparent organisational apparatus to do so that is never given any explanation). He has various of the powers that generally resemble those of the comic-book Kraven. He is even divested of his traditional costume, although there is a scene near the end where it appears that he receives this. With Kraven rewritten as a superhero, what we have in all but name is a big-screen version of tv’s Manimal (1983). Although given that Kraven never actually undergoes any Animal Transformation, what this is perhaps closest to is something of Tarzan.
We also get the introduction of several other super-villain characters. But these are conducted in ways where it feels as though the writers simply took a handful of names from the Spider-Man comics and added them to the story they wanted to write. Alessandro Nivola’s ganglord Aleksei Systevich is supposed to be the same Rhino we had in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but here the character just exhibits tough skin and we have no idea why. In the comics, Calypso is a Haitian voodoo priestess and a major villainess who is Kraven’s girlfriend, but in the film becomes no more than a lawyer who forms an alliance with him, divested of any villainous capacity. At the end, Dmitri reveals he is The Chameleon. The Chameleon is a shapeshifter who actually predated Kraven’s appearance in Marvel comics and is a master of disguise, later updated to a shapeshifter, but this is no more than a last-minute plot reveal of stunningly little importance. Christopher Abbott’s The Foreigner is another Spider-Man villain who dates back to 1986. When I first saw Abbott in the film doing things in the blink of an eye, I thought he was another speedster like The Flash or Quicksilver. What is not made apparent in the film is that he can hypnotise people for ten seconds during which he does things before they come around. It feels as though these are far more colourful characters on the page that have been stripped of anything interesting by the writers and made into generic supporting characters.
The action scenes are okay. J.C. Chandor sets up one or two that get the pulse running, especially a sequence with Aaron Taylor-Johnson chasing after his brother’s abductors on foot as they flee in an vehicle, with he running through the crowds on an overhead walkway, smashing through the windows to the ground, fighting around the outside of a speeding SUV and trying to grab onto a departing helicopter with a net and being dragged out across the water.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Kraven the Hunter, rewritten as a superhero for the film
We have had the better part of two decades of the MCU, the Spider-Man films, the DCEU, along with plenty of imitators and other non-comic-book superheroic works, and the Superhero Film is well baked into cinematic canon by now. When you consider Kraven the Hunter against that, it feels like a feeble attempt to join the bandwagon. In 2024, it feels lightweight trying to mount a film about a superhero who simply exhibits some animal-like traits – we don’t even get to see Aaron Taylor-Johnson transform, which might have made things interesting – up against the epic battles of The Avengers or the Spider-Man films.
The Sony Marvel films also have the ability to recruit top acting talent – Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Andy Serkis, Chiwetel Eijiofor, Woody Harrelson, Stephen Graham in the Venom films, Jared Leto and Jared Harris in Morbius, Dakota Johnson, Emma Roberts and Sydney Sweeney in Madame Web – and then waste them in roles that are utterly unworthy of their talent. Here it is Russell Crowe’s turn. You wonder what on Earth it was about the script that excited Crowe enough that he decided to adopt a Russian accent in a role that could have been played by anybody.
Kraven the Hunter was the fifth film as director for J.C. Chandor who had previously made the well-received likes of Margin Call (2011), All is Lost (2013), A Most Violent Year (2014) and Triple Frontier (2019). The most interesting name on the credits is Richard Wenk, director of the mini-cult vampire film Vamp (1986) and a couple of other genre works with Attack of the 5’2” Woman (1994) and Wishcraft (2002). In the 2010s, Wenk had a career revival as a screenwriter with action films like 16 Blocks (2006), The Mechanic (2011), The Expendables 2 (2012), The Equalizer (2014) and sequels, Countdown (2016), Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), The Magnificent Seven (2016), Renegades (2017), The Protege (2021) and Fast Charlie (2023).
