Kraven the Hunter is Surprisingly Good

The series known as Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) is notable for some of the worst movies of recent years while also standing out as a particularly cynical exercise.

It’s built around a series of characters adjacent to Spider-Man, even though Spidey himself has been licensed to Disney’s Marvel series and isn’t a direct participant. Instead, we get all-time clunkers like Morbius and Madame Web, as well as the Venom trilogy, which is at least popular, but not especially good.

Now there’s Kraven the Hunter, which arrives with little fanfare, and is said to be the last of this series of movies. So it’s something of a surprise that it’s not all that bad. If you can get past the beginning of 30 minutes of mumbo-jumbo-driven exposition and that it spends its final 10 minutes unnaturally setting up sequels that’ll almost certainly never happen, Kraven the Hunter spends is a well-directed, first-rate action-adventure movie, albeit one where the hero has superpowers, while the villain can turn into a rhino.

That opening section takes a long time to set up the premise: Sergei and Dmitri are the two young sons of a Russian mob boss (Russell Crowe, in a performance consisting entirely of heavily-accented monologues about why it’s important to be strong and bad to be weak). When they’re kids, a lion nearly kills Sergei on a trip to Africa. But thanks to a mysterious serum given to him by a young girl named Calypso, he survives and develops cartoonish super-strength, allowing him, as an adult, to break into (and out of) a Siberian prison to kill the leader of the Russian underworld.

This is as stupid as it sounds. But Sergei grows up to be Aaron Taylor-Johnson, while Dmitri becomes Fred Hechinger (last seen as one of the mincing twin emperors in Gladiator II). That African girl grows into a lawyer, played by Ariana DeBose, as they battle a supervillain (Alessandro Nivola). This part of the movie is thrilling. The director knows his way around action, and the film mostly avoids the muddle that we’re used to from the previous Sony Marvel movies, and most recent action filmmaking in general.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson proves a capable action star that owes more to the John Wick/Jack Reacher tradition than that of Marvel. Though I’m not sure why Kraven, who has two Russian parents and is played by an English actor, has a flawless American accent. Meanwhile, the other main roles are cast counterintuitively, but successfully with Oscar-winning Broadway veteran DeBose, indie mainstay Nivola, and former Girls boyfriend Christopher Abbott.

There’s also some humor, and it’s not of the unintentional variety, although some of the animal CGI is a bit iffy. There are hints that things were changed in post-production, and dialogue is spoken that’s not coming out of the characters’ mouths. Kraven the Hunter was directed by J.C. Chandor, who made the outstanding dramas Margin Call, All is Lost and A Most Violent Year, and is making his first film as director since the decent Netflix action heist movie Triple Frontier, five years ago.

The Sony Marvel movies have mostly looked like garbage, especially Morbius, which might’ve been the least visually appealing movie of the last five years. But Kraven sports outstanding, coherent action sequences, whether it’s a chase through a city or a climactic battle that happens to take place against the backdrop of a rhinoceros stampede. Will this series of movies be missed? Not particularly. But at least it’s going out something of a high note.