For the duration of its first action set-piece, set on a snow-covered highway followed by an assassination in a fortified prison, Kraven the Hunter — God-willing, the last of Sony’s Spider-man universe’s spin-off films — pulls-off a neat little magic trick. It’s a sleight of hand that fools one into thinking this might not be such a bad little film after all.

In those few minutes, one realises that Aaron Taylor-Johnson fits the part physically and acts professionally (he’s had considerable experience in his long-acting career), and the action isn’t half-bad.

The ruse continues with diminishing returns, as if the storytelling is gradually slipping down a slope, for about 15 minutes more, when the sequence cuts to Sergei’s past (that’s Taylor-Johnson’s character’s name, by the way).

Years ago, Nikolai (Russell Crowe) takes his young sons Sergei (Levi Miller) and his half-brother Dimitri (Billy Barratt) out of an elite school in New York after the death of their mentally unstable mother. His reasoning is that the family needs time to reconnect and that, being a crime lord, his sons have grown a tad too soft.

Kraven the Hunter’s biggest put-off is its lack of energy

Soon, in a wilderness hunting expedition in Ghana, Sergei is attacked by a fabled lion that has killed thousands of men (or so the myth goes, one minor character says), who after maiming the boy, takes him off to a young girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova), who treats him with a mystical potion that would give him super animal-infused powers (a drop of the lion’s blood also drips into Sergei’s open wound for good measure as well).

Sergei recovers, has a spat with dad, escapes home (with his animal-powered abilities giving him an edge), and becomes a nightmare for the poachers of the world when he becomes an adult in the present.

From here onwards, the film goes to Hades.

The story somehow crams amateurly written plot-threads about a father’s manipulation of his two sons, one son’s kidnapping (Dimitri, now played by Fred Hechinger), poachers, a lawyer (the grown-up Calypso, Ariana DeBose), a mercenary (Alessandro Nivola) who keeps himself dosed-up so that he doesn’t turn into a human-rhino (comic-book fans know him as the Spider-Man villain Rhino), and a villain who creates ocular illusions (comic readers know this obscure bad guy as The Foreigner, played by Christopher Abbott).

The thing is, almost all of this feels as if it’s written on a whim — or worse yet: as a half-hearted getting-it-done assignment.

The screenplay by Richard Wenk (Equalizer trilogy, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back) and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Uncharted, Iron Man, Punisher: War Zone) feels like it is chopped-up and reshuffled by editor Chris Lebenzon (he has edited most of Jerry Bruckheimer’s and Tim Burton’s blockbusters) and uncredited editors Craig Wood, Milos Djakovic and Zach Vandlik.

Most of what we see doesn’t work in the film’s favour.

Kraven’s biggest put-off is its lack of energy — an aspect that can be set right at the edit with appropriate cuts and music (the score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine and Benjamin Wallfisch is sparse and ineffectively used). Scenes just happen, without any sense of urgency, authenticity (even the fake kind) or, even for that matter, basic engagement.

While Ben Davis’ cinematography does make Kraven look like a legit feature film, J.C. Chandor’s direction (he directed Triple Frontier, All Is Lost and the hit music video Despacito), the editing and the screenplay ruin what could have been a good enough production. In fact, one can actually see the building blocks of an okay film here, provided that anything to do with Marvel was thrown out the window.

Released by Sony, Kraven the Hunter is rated PG-13, and will likely be the last of Spider-man villain films…praise the Lord Almightyy

Published in Dawn, ICON, December 29th, 2024