Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Following a transformative near-death experience, a young Sergi Kravinoff runs away from the world of his ruthless crime family. Alone in the wilderness, he becomes a protector to animals and defender to the weak. He becomes, The Hunter.

When it comes to superhero films, we rarely turn up to see an Oscar-Winning performance. Sometimes we’re in it for the twisty, gripping plot, and other times it’s for some shirtless action sequences. I’ll let you decide which category this movie falls into.

In the ‘Sony Spider-verse Universe’ or whatever they’re calling it, Kraven The Hunter ranks higher than Morbius and Madam Web. Which isn’t the grand defeat you think it is. What failed this movie on a massive scale was its plot. I won’t go on a rant about how bad things were, instead I’ll stick to a few key points.

Firstly, the 30minute backstory into Sergi’s life with his brother and dad was unnecessarily long. It immensely took away from the pacing set at the top of the movie when we meet an older Sergi, aka Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The set-up of the key villain in the movie, Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), was severely undercooked. We have a brief intro to the character, but he doesn’t become an issue until halfway through the film. Even then, we never got to grips with what he did that made him such a bad guy… You know, before he kidnapped Sergi’s brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger).

Another underdeveloped, and poorly written character has to be Calypso (Ariana DeBose) who is the lynchpin to Sergi’s transformation. Her shoe-horned presence in the entirety of the movie was to perform the same magic trick twice. A scheme so obvious that they gave her one of the worst lines in the film: My grandmother died not long after that. I never saw her again. It’s almost like they weren’t trying.

In terms of what did work: Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Say what you will about the film, but ATJ commits to the stunts and sells the physicality of Kraven with all the fervour the role requires. The same can be said for Russell Crowe who played Kraven’s father. At one point, he had me convinced he might actually be Russian.

With superhero fatigue well and truly set in, Kraven the Hunter is what it is: a forgettable flotsam in the never-ending multiverse of superhero cinema.

But hey, if all you’re after is some mindless action, a bit of thirst trap shirtlessness, and a handful of entertaining stunts, then Kraven the Hunter delivers exactly that. Nothing more, nothing less.