Kraven the Hunter review: Directionless, bland superhero movie

On December 21, 2024By Littum

HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – Kraven the Hunter is the latest of Sony’s extended Spider-verse films, focusing on the villain’s origin stories. With its thoroughly ironic fanbase, Morbius (2022) followed up the first two Venom films (the third was released earlier this year), which may be the series’ only qualified success. In quality, Kraven the Hunter is much closer Madame Web (2024) than the other films, as it’s a bland, directionless blob of a film rather than something that could be seen as so bad that it’s ironically good.

Directed by JC Chandor, Kraven the Hunter stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff, later known as Kraven. Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger and Alessandro Nivola round out the cast. Primarily, the film is about Kraven’s relationship with his father (Crowe), but the film is so directionless that it is difficult to give a good plot synopsis of the film. There’s a kidnapping plot involving Kraven’s brother (Hechinger), and Kraven is also on the hunt for evil criminals connected to his father’s criminal empire. These story threads are so tangled that it’s hard to stick to a driving force behind the film’s plot.

The dialogue is eerie, including the line, “My grandmother died, and then I never saw her again.” Is that how it works? It’s easy to make fun of the worst examples of bad writing, but the problems run deeper than the corny dialogue. There is no character development beyond the broadest, most obvious beats. And however comically accurate that is, the fact that the anti-hero gets his powers from a random magical potion and lion’s blood entering one of his wounds defies the kind of realistic-seeming filmmaking that characterizes modern superhero movies.

The action sequences, which are usually the hallmark of comic book movies, are pretty pedestrian. Kraven the Hunter makes little use of its R rating beyond a few profanities and some bloody violence, and its action sequences are full of obvious special effects or predictable chase sequences.

Some bad movies are offensively, aggressively bad—the kind of bad that makes me angry to be in the presence of the film, the kind of bad that feels like a personal affront. Kraven the Hunter is very bad. It’s not the travesty that early reviews have made it out to be because it never tries to be more than a comic book movie that would have been better released in the mid to late nineties. Kraven the Hunter is easily forgettable, and aside from the boldest of the Sony Spider-verse films, it fits right into the bottom tier of the genre.

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