Another Spider-Man Spinoff Misses the Target

If you made a list of Spider-Man’s greatest villains, Kraven the Hunter wouldn’t make the top five. He might not crack the top ten! Most average moviegoers have probably never even heard of him. If they know him at all, it’s thanks to his supporting role in Sony’s incredible Spider-Man 2 PS5 game.

So while you could make a Kraven movie — clearly, I’m writing about one right now — I am not sure why you would make one. Especially one where Spider-Man himself cannot and does not appear. Having sat through Sony’s new Kraven the Hunter, I see no evidence to the contrary of that assessment.

If there is more to the Kraven character than meets the eye on the page, Aaron Taylor-Johnson didn’t bring it to the screen. His Kraven — real name Sergei Kravinoff — is not a super-villain but rather a vigilante who targets evildoers around the globe. He maintains a list of the worst offenders — arms dealers, illegal poachers, and so on — and bumps them off one by one. (Yes, instead of hunting animals, Kraven now hunts hunters. Go figure.)

Although Kraven has no job or obvious source of income, he somehow maintains his own private cargo plane (with its own personal pilot on call 24/7) for whenever he needs to venture off to some far corner of the globe to stab someone in the neck with a tiger fang.

READ MORE: Every Spider-Man Movie and Spinoff, Ranked

This work as “The Hunter” should keep Kraven fairly busy, but he keeps getting sidetracked by domestic drama. Most of it centers on his father Nikolai (Russell Crowe, doing an uncanny impression of Boris from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons) who is a ruthless criminal in his own right. A punishingly long flashback shows how Nikolai abused Sergei and his half-brother Dmitri in order to toughen them up and prepare them for the Darwinian world of international crime syndicates.

This flashback also reveals the origin of Kraven’s animalistic super powers, which involve — and I am not making this up — a combination of a lion attack, a drop of lion blood, and a mysterious voodoo elixir poured down his throat at just the right moment by a girl named Calypso, who happens to stumble across Kraven’s right as the aforementioned lion gets a craving for Kraven. I would explain more about how a magic drink, lion blood, and getting eaten by a wild animal combine to give Kraven the ability to rip the doors off of SUVs, but the movie itself doesn’t provide any further details than that, so your guess is as good as mine.

Anywho, back in the present, Kraven’s hunts create a power vacuum in the underworld that several gangsters want to fill, including Nikolai and a rival known as the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), a Russian crook with a vague medical condition he treats by wearing a goofy little backpack with a tube that attaches to a port in his side. The bag hides an IV that constantly feeds him medicine. If only the Rhino had been bitten by a rhino while a drop of rhino blood got into his bloodstream as he drank voodoo juice, so much death and violence could have been avoided.

By my count that’s already two villains, not including Kraven himself. Perhaps to compensate for Kraven’s lack of a certain friendly neighborhood hero, the film tosses in several more baddies. There’s the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), a well-dressed assassin who hypnotizes his targets by taking off his glasses and counting to three out loud, a power that is about as cool onscreen as it sounds on paper.  Meanwhile Sergei’s weaselly brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) debates whether to side with his father or his brother in their escalating conflict. Spider-Man fans know Dmitri eventually becomes the Chameleon, who can assume alternate other people’s identities. In Kraven, that gift mostly manifests as Hechinger imitating other characters’ voices and singing like Tony Bennett at one point.

In the moments Taylor-Johnson and Hechinger get to work together, Kraven the Hunter briefly feels like a real movie. And a Succession-style battle between super-villains for control of a family’s criminal empire actually sounds like a pretty fun pitch for a Marvel movie. But there are those other characters, including a very lost looking Ariana DeBose as the adult version of Calypso, all fighting for screen time. Between the subplots, the fan service, and the parade of totally forgettable action scenes (rated R for a bunch of CGI blood, and not much else), the war between the Kravinoffs never gets a chance to find its footing.

At least give Kraven this much: As directed by J.C. Chandor, a skillful filmmaker who has never made a bad movie before, this Spider-Man “spinoff” is more competent and lucid than the others Sony has released like Madame Web or Morbius. Its plot basically makes sense. It hasn’t been hacked to pieces in the editing room, or reshot within an inch of its life. Kraven is never especially good — at times, it is downright boring — but it also isn’t a disaster. (If it was a disaster, it might be more fun.)

At least until the third act. Then Taylor-Johnson starts bouncing off the walls like Halle Berry’s Catwoman. The Rhino finally gets involved and looks like a rejected design from a a film Roger Corman would have produced to fulfill a contractual obligation to Marvel. Kraven and Calypso start teaming up for reasons that are unclear to the audience and to both of the characters. DeBose delivers a line of dialogue so dumb it makes “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died!” sound reasonable in comparison.

During the big climax, Kraven gets poisoned and hallucinates his greatest fear: Spiders. Why would Kraven, a man with mystical powers that allow him to mentally control animals (sort of) be afraid of spiders? I’ll tell you why: So Sony could put a shot of Kraven surrounded by spiders in their trailer, implying that maybe Spider-Man or some Spider-Man adjacent character might show up in the film. That’s Kraven the Hunter, and all these Sony superhero movies, in a nutshell: Bait and switches designed to maintain a license until the next actual Spider-Man film.

Additional Thoughts:

-Ariana DeBose won an Oscar in 2022. Two years later, she’s playing the granddaughter of a voodoo priestess who works as an investigative lawyer and also happens to be deadly with a bow and arrow — supposedly because she did archery at summer camp as a kid. Life comes at you fast.

-Let me see if I have this right. Kraven is Russian, comes from a Russian family, and lives in Russia on some kind of nature preserve. When he’s not at home, he spends most of his time in England — where Kraven star Aaron Taylor-Johnson is from. So naturally Kraven talks with … a generic American accent?

-I brought it up, so here are the ten best Spider-Man villains (in descending order): Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Kingpin, Chameleon, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, Venom, the Lizard, the Vulture, and the Jackal. Kraven does not make the cut. He’s probably somewhere in the next ten, behind guys like Sandman, Electro, Scorpion, Tombstone, Smythe, and Mister Negative.

-Having seen and reviewed every one of these Sony Spider-Man Universe movies, I feel I have the power — and thus the responsibility — to say this: Sony has produced some excellent Spider-Man movies throughout the years, both in live-action and in animation. These Spidey spinoffs without Spider-Man in them really need to stop. They stink.

RATING: 3/10