Kraven the Hunter is the dull death knell for Sony’s Spider-Man movies

J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter is utterly perplexing, from its existence to its execution. But that doesn’t make it fun to watch. In fact, it might be 2024’s most weightless Hollywood studio movie, both physically and emotionally. Based on yet another Spider-Man arch-nemesis, it joins Madame Web, Morbius, and the Venom trilogy in Sony’s bizarre attempt to get some kind of Spidey series or universe off the ground without Peter Parker himself.

In some cases, this approach almost works; the Venom movies grew increasingly self-aware as Tom Hardy’s gonzo dual role became part of their charm. But for a delicious comic baddie like Kraven, a big-game hunter whose entire ethos revolves around killing Spider-Man, divorcing him from his nemesis is a tall task, and one Chandor’s movie absolutely isn’t up to.

Kraven begins enjoyably enough, with Kraven, aka Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), showing off some animalistic physical skills while performing a prison assassination/breakout. His eyes glow, hinting at some kind of underlying powers fueling his physicality. This premise ought to be all we need to have a good time. Instead, the movie immediately pumps the brakes and enters childhood-flashback mode for about half an hour to set up a flimsy father-son dynamic and other plot threads.

Those elements of Kraven really don’t need this much groundwork — not when the characters are so broad and cartoonish on paper: animal-themed assassins and the like, who literalize the movie’s metaphors about food chains and apex predators in the worlds of business and organized crime. But Kraven’s scenes are pumped full of dead air and stone-faced somberness, despite the occasional attempt at levity.

It’s a largely joyless affair, and Chandor can’t seem to decide on a dramatic or comedic tone, let alone a blend of the two. Taylor-Johnson often stands around delivering lines that seem intended to be catchphrases, but he does so with all the determination of someone who loathes the material. A quipper-hero Kraven is not, and neither is Taylor-Johnson. But then, practically every actor in the cast is entirely checked out. Rarely has a superhero movie featured this many talented performers phoning it in. But with such bland material, can you blame them?

Russell Crowe plays Russian mobster Nikolai Kravinoff, father to Sergei and his brother Dmitri. When the boys’ mother dies by suicide (“She take own life,” Nikolai rasps in his comically Hollywood-Russian accent), he whisks his sons away on a hunting trip in Ghana to test their mettle.

Simultaneously (and perhaps nearby, though the film has little sense of physical space), a young American girl named Calypso visits her mystic grandmother, who hands her a magic potion with the power to revive someone who’s gravely injured. It’s a good thing, too, since Sergei is mauled by a lion he refuses to shoot. Calypso’s potion helps save his life, after repeated extreme close-ups of the lion’s blood mixing with his own.

While Sony’s rogues’ gallery spinoffs never actually feature Spider-Man, they seem hell-bent on having his biggest foes take his place in various ways. In the comics, Kraven does in fact consume a potion that gives him enhanced speed and strength, but he’s never been imbued with animal DNA or had animal-like powers the way Spidey does. (Kraven’s mutant kid Alexei eventually takes up his mantle in the comics, so at least there’s some precedent, though the movie often feels like the writers are picking ideas at random out of a hat.)

On screen, the strife between father and son grows great enough that Sergei runs away from home, just as he begins exhibiting vague powers the movie never fully fleshes out. He’s strong and fast, and sometimes his eyes zoom in on objects from afar. (He’s more digital camera than eagle.) He also might be able to physically communicate with or perhaps control animals in some fashion, but this is never quite clear.

Back in the present, he hunts poachers in Eastern Russia and mobsters in Europe, but the code he claims to cling to seems entirely fluid. He’s an animal lover who eats fish and wears fur, and he has no trouble killing henchmen, though his moral dilemmas seem to kick in when he’s about to knock off the occasional head honcho. He’s targeted, for reasons unknown, by a rival of his father’s, Aleksei Sytsevich, aka the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), which leads to his brother (played as an adult by Fred Hechinger) being kidnapped. That in turn leads Kraven to seek the help of adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose), now a lawyer, who happens to be involved somehow too.

The details don’t really matter. They all seem to have been inserted to nominally connect one chase scene to the next. Kraven often catches up with armed thugs, performs various flippy maneuvers — with the help of massless CGI — and kills them at close range, as the movie cuts away from each instance of digital blood spurting from their jugulars. There’s a viciousness to his methods that the edit seems hell-bent on sanding down. Worse yet, there’s nothing really driving the character, beyond the happenstance of his brother being kidnapped by the Rhino’s goons. (Dmitri isn’t an intended target, he’s simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Christopher Abbott shows up as a bored-looking assassin called the Foreigner, whose powers appear to involve freezing his opponents in place for three seconds as he steps gingerly to the left. Hechinger, sadly, has little to do but be abducted. Dmitri occasionally performs spot-on imitations of other people — he’s Marvel Comics’ Chameleon, after all — but not only does this talent never factor into the plot (seriously, never), it also doesn’t really stand out. The trick is executed by having the actors Hechinger is imitating rerecord his lines in their own voices, creating an exact impression. But Kraven the Hunter is filled to the brim with noticeably poor ADR, so every character may as well be a ventriloquist.

The only actors who seem to give a damn are DeBose, who overcompensates for her thankless, exposition-heavy role by delivering every word like it’s the end of the world, and Nivola, who generally seems to be having fun. He even cackles as he explains his backstory, a condition that causes his skin to harden like armor. (Though he inexplicably grows a rhino horn from his forehead as well.) The lack of on-screen effort from everyone else might have at least been tolerable if scenes didn’t last either a mere handful of seconds — just long enough for a quip to fall flat — or last an eternity, as every bit of physical impact unfolds at a noncommittal distance, without being enhanced by any formalistic sound design. Whatever the reasons for the film’s many delays, it still plays like a rough cut.

It’s a chore to sit through, and this absolutely shouldn’t be the case when there’s such rich material to draw from. There’s nothing truly driving this Kraven — neither obsession like in the comics nor his father’s rejection, as established by this very story. The filmmaking never features the operatic sense of pomp associated with the character. He isn’t so much “Kraven the Hunter” as he is “Kraven the occasionally nice guy,” as though Sony were attempting to turn him into their own White Panther (down to the movie’s title font), albeit without the grandeur.

Granted, the film does actually pull one idea from Kraven’s Last Hunt (the seminal Kraven comic), but this arrives in the form of Kraven hallucinating spiders. In the comic, this abstraction represents his obsession with Spider-Man — who doesn’t appear to exist in this universe. In the movie, it seems to have something to do with his mother’s fear of spiders, which isn’t established until after his hallucination. Is arachnophobia hereditary? A coincidence? Or was some lingering Spidey reference eventually excised from this movie, leaving this remnant behind? Who’s to say? Given how it plays out, all of the above options seem equally likely.

This fleeting spider reference is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. But it also speaks to the haphazard assembly of Sony’s Spider-Man-free Spider-movies, and the half-hearted nature with which these characters and their material have been adapted to form a loose continuity. Nothing in the movie seems to matter, from its internal lore to the extraneous sequel setups that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethoses. Audiences have not cared much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem to be this indifferent as well.

Kraven the Hunter debuts in theaters on Dec. 13.