Directed by J.C. Chandor | Written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, Kraven The Hunter created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko | 127 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Crave

The Sony/Marvel project to make movies around the villains of Spider-Man (but not featuring Spider-Man, except in their animated offerings) has been a bit of a dud, if not a disaster. Consider Madame Web, Morbius, or any of those Venom movies — admittedly, the third that came out earlier this year remains unseen by me. Some made money, some didn’t, but it’s unlikely any of these will be fondly remembered. If recent rumours are to be believed, this whole venture might be over.

Well, the last one out of the gate might be the best — though that’s not terribly high praise. This is a sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, laughable superhero-adjacent movie. It is in no way a good one, but it does manage to be entertaining.

My recollection of Kraven The Hunter from the Spider-Man comics was that he was a bit of a joke, a big game hunter who the wallcrawler regularly dispatched. The story of his death in the late 1980s, Kraven’s Last Hunt by J. M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck, and Bob McLeod, gave him some late-arriving legitimacy. (Naturally, Marvel resurrected him.)

What appealed to me from a distance about this adaptation was the involvement of J.C. Chandor, a filmmaker who has gone from strength to strength with movies as diverse and successful as Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier.

You can see some of his talent here, intermittently. The opening is especially promising — Kraven aka Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) finds his way into a Siberian prison in order to find a gangster and kill him. We get a taste of his physical gifts — super-strength and agility, mostly — and the picture shows off a sense of humour in the negotiations between Kraven and his cellmate.

Sony released that bit online:

Then we get a detailed flashback to Sergei’s youth where his father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe), made life miserable for him and his younger brother, Dimitri aka Dimo (as an adult, Fred Hechinger),  Nikolai’s a Russian gangster and a great white hunter, pushing a painfully retrograde version of masculinity on his sons.

The flashback doesn’t do much to forward the story, though it does illustrate Kraven’s origin — one of the silliest to date. A young woman named Calypso (later as an adult she’s a lawyer and Kraven ally, played by Ariana DeBose) saves him from a lion attack by giving him her family’s secret potion — where it comes from or how it provides Kraven his animal-inspired power is entirely unexplained. Calypso says something about “having her own secrets.”

Kraven has a lot of enemies — a guy named Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) with a beef against the Kravinoff family because none of them will go into business with him. He’s like Lewis Strauss from Oppenheimer, nursing a lifetime grudge based on a perceived slight, though a whole lot less plausible. We never find out why Sytsevich is so needy, though we do learn he has his own alter ego, which I won’t spoil here other than to say it’s a ridiculous twist on yet another one of Spidey’s rogues gallery.

Also hanging around is another deadly agent, The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), whose powers are not only never explained, they don’t make any sense. And then there’s Dimo, who mostly gets rescued and complains about his father and brother because they’re much cooler than he is.

These are all entirely capable actors, but they’re adrift. Nivola seems to know what kind of a movie he’s in and so goes big, but Abbott doesn’t have the same opportunities with his sullen baddie. Crowe is a graduate of the John Malkovich-as-Teddy-KGB school of Russian accents, which livens things up considerably. DeBose just looks embarrassed with the dialogue she has to say and the lack of any chemistry with Taylor-Johnson.

I wished the filmmakers had given Kraven more of a sense of humour about all of this — if he could’ve loosened up and made fun of his antagonists that would’ve been welcome. The themes around power and patriarchal legacy are worth exploring, but they end up feeling confused.

Still, despite all this nonsense, Kraven The Hunter still manages to be worth sitting through. The action sequences are capable — when they’re not involving obviously CGI water buffaloes and lions. We get a terrific chase across London where Kraven is bouncing around the top of a van, peeling it apart with his bare hands. When the movie just focuses on what Kraven can do — usually in several scenes of hand-to-hand combat and R-rated violence — it’s quite a bit of fun. And though Kraven never seems like the brightest bulb in the box, Taylor-Johnson gives him swagger. That’s more than you can say about Morbius.