‘Kraven the Hunter’ Review: The Mild Hunt

Fun fact: Once upon a time, Ryan Coogler wanted Kraven the Hunter to be one of the main antagonists of Black Panther, intending to recreate a famously intense showdown between T’Challa and Kraven from Christopher Priest’s comics run in the 1990s for the 2018 blockbuster. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that Sony held the rights.

Considering that this is the man who managed to turn a third-stringer like Namor into a violent revolutionary rebuke of colonization, it’s easy to imagine what Coogler might’ve done with Kraven as a supernaturally dangerous, unhinged poacher in Africa. And it would have been easy to do it during J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter: a shapeless, rudderless, unimaginative bore that fumbles the ball with every single conceivable aspect of the character.

There’s one thing that soars in the film, and it’s Russell Crowe as Kraven’s abusive overlord father, Nikolai, an alpha obsessed with power and dominion over nature. Crowe seems to fill up every corner of the frame when he’s on screen, his Russian-accented gravel pit of a voice matching any lion’s roar we hear throughout. Twenty years earlier, plus or minus a few months of parkour training, Crowe could’ve played Kraven himself and been a bullseye of a choice.

Unfortunately, he’s nowhere to be seen when Kraven the Hunter needs him most, as much of Crowe’s screen time is in flashbacks. Sixteen years ago, Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) are pulled out of boarding school when their mother dies, with Nikolai attempting to raise his boys to be real men, part of which involves taking them on safari with a few of his colleagues. While out in the field, Sergei is attacked by a mythical lion, and a girl named Calypso (Ariana DeBose) heals him with a magical potion from her African tarot-reading grandmother—and, no, the film spends zero time unpacking that—he finds out that he has enhanced strength, speed, endurance, and awareness, which he focuses by running away from home, and training in the Siberian wilderness. Thus, Kraven is born.

Fast forward a few years, and Kraven has decided to become some flavor of vigilante, trailing scumbags from a single list of clients held by one of his poacher victims. The superpowered vigilante shtick was utterly cooked as a concept for a superhero property years ago, and the only way it’s remained remotely fresh is through deconstruction, as evidenced by Netflix’s Marvel shows. For Chandor’s film to present it uncritically is an uninspiring choice to begin with, but it’s downright criminal applying it to a character whose distorted ethics but strict code of honor make him one of Spider-Man’s most unique and fascinating villains.

Kraven the Hunter even fails to take advantage of the most basic fertile ground of its concept. For one, it all too quickly trades guerrilla warfare out in the wild for chases in the streets of London and indoor sets that feel recycled from a local Rainforest Cafe.

Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven adds absolutely nothing new, unique, or interesting to the cinematic superhero canon, to the point you almost wish that he had deployed his Sokovian accent from Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. Throughout, he skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.

Alessandro Nivola channels a Peter Lorre-esque brio as damaged criminal mastermind Rhino, and Christopher Abbott’s take on the phase-shifting sociopath The Foreigner is equally fun. (Nivola in particular has one of the most hilariously bizarre physical reactions to a bit of bad news unlike any we’ve seen on film in recent memory.) But once the special effects take over, that fun is suffocated. For its remainder, all that Kraven the Hunter does is serve to remind audiences of the superhero flicks that have done it all better, smarter, and more effectively.