Kraven the Hunter: Not the Villain We Expected, Hoped For… or Even Needed

By John Kirk

Rating: C+

A classic villain from the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-Man comic days, Kraven was one of the wallcrawler’s deadliest villains because of his tenacity and ruthlessness.

A born killer, he was a big game hunter from the days when this was a legitimate and intimidating profession. Skilled with all sorts of weapons and hunting techniques, Kraven was essentially just a regular Joe with no superpowers and a really bad sense of fashion.

The comic version was originally contracted by J. Jonah Jameson to hunt and kill Spider-Man, but in Kraven the Hunter, Sony gets on the Marvel bandwagon, deciding we needed another hero. Whether the audience wants it or not.

There are two audiences this film will attract. The first, presumably comic readers who want to see how this touchstone Marvel character has been interpreted. They might be in for a disappointment or a shock. The other audience will be non-comic readers who just want to see a Marvel film. For them, this film will be less disagreeable.

The story: two brothers, Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) live constantly under the thumb of their toxically masculine Russian crime boss father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe). Constantly admonishing his sons to become real men, on the death of their mother, he takes them to Africa on a hunting expedition.

When Nikolai is nearly mauled by a lion, he is saved a young girl, Calypso (Ariana DeBose) and her voodoo-practicing grandmother’s healing potion. This imbues Sergei with animal-like powers and he becomes the Hunter, a near-mythical scourge on crime lords everywhere.

It's the secret origin pretext that’s the heart of the problem with this film.

First, putting on my resident comic-nerd hat, I feel it’s important to point out that Kraven the Hunter is a supervillain. One of Spider-Man’s deadliest foes, through guile, planning and obsessive determination, he actually defeats the wall-crawler.

The storyline Kraven’s Last Hunt (by J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck and Bob McLeod) is probably the finest treatment of this character I’ve ever read in a comic. It highlights Kraven’s insecurities and fears and while this makes him vulnerable, it also makes him one of the most relatable villains in the Spider-Man rogues gallery. But that’s because the character is what he is meant to be: a bad guy. This film overlooks that history of character development and makes Kraven into something he isn’t.

Also, the fact that he gets superpowers not only adds to the character’s weakness, but it’s a real stretch of a pretext for him to get them in this way. We are to believe that the young Calypso just happens to be given a magic healing potion, abandons her parents while they are on safari, and discovers the giant lion that also just leaves its prey, Sergei, in front of her to be healed.

It’s such a contrivance that it breaks the limits of suspension of disbelief. Heck, the kids don’t even meet until years later when Sergei somehow manages to track her down. The audience is supposed to accept through some vague excuse that as a hunter, that’s what he does.

In all honesty, I think if the lion brought the wounded Sergei to some indigenous holy site and gained his powers through some sort of mystical connection, I’d have believed it a lot more.

Also annoying is the muddled-up sequence of events in the first half of the film. We initially see Sergei as an adult breaking into a Russian gulag to hunt one of his targets. Then afterwards, we see him and his brother as kids. Then it’s a ONE YEAR LATER treatment before we are ushered back to the present for how the adult Sergei is living his life in his adult years and the meat of the story.

The acting is forced, and the dialogue is either predictable or cheesy. Even so, I believe forcing Kraven to be something that he was originally not is at the heart of all these defects. Not even Crowe’s fine performance as the Russian crime lord can alleviate these issues.

It’s not all bad. The fight sequences are extremely gory and well within the realm of acceptability for a film in this genre. Taylor-Johnson is ripped beyond belief and there are some pretty nasty ways that bad guys meet their untimely end at the hands of the Hunter.

Reaching back to Kraven’s Russian roots is also cool and if you filter out the cheese, there are some funny moments as well. There’s an interpretation on another Spider-Man villain, The Rhino, that’s actually fairly workable in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it even opens up ground for another Spider-Man classic villain that will entertain the first type of audience I mentioned.

This hero doesn’t even worry about killing his enemies either. So, there’s a little bit of crude justice satisfaction in the film as well. There are no end sequences during the credits either. So, you’re good to leave right away.

But this is not a great film. In fact, it even looks like it could have been made on a television budget. I’m wondering why this wasn’t made for the small screen. A cinematic version of this story definitely wasn’t needed. But then again, neither was the hero.

Kraven the Hunter. Directed by J.C. Chandor. Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, and Ariana DeBose. In theatres December 13.