Movie Review: Kraven the Hunter

These days, we need all the good news we can get to help us get through another miserable day on this dying cesspool of a planet known as Earth. Variety provided one of these essential blessed deliveries late this past Friday evening when they reported that despite rumors to the contrary, Sony's maligned and largely commercially unsuccessful Spider-Man villanverse (this isn't the official name, it's just what I'm electing to call it at the moment) would NOT be ending with Kraven the Hunter. Reading this headline early Saturday morning may've been the happiest I was all of last week. When you have something as beautiful as the SMVV on your hands, it would be a travesty to put it out to pasture over a trivial thing like tens of millions in losses for Sony and poor audience reception.

So why am I legitimately thrilled by this news? Simple: The SMVV represents the rebirth of the pre-MCU superhero movies that dominated the 2000's. It was a simpler time where the genre wasn't micromanaged or homogenized in the slightest. Nobody gave a shit about shared universes, sequel teases or even basic continuity. If anything, it felt like there was some kind of Kevin Feige-esque overlord mandating that the product on screen was as dumb and disjointed as possible. While these movies weren't great by any stretch, there was a real charm to their shortcomings that makes most of them at least kind of fun to watch.

Kraven the Hunter is able to continue this old, proud tradition that the SMVV has revitalized. What makes J.C. Chandor's long delayed origin story for the tight vest-clad land animal answer to Aquaman played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson uniquely charming is that it's the first of these films to carry an R-rating. The freedom to say/do whatever the hell they want gives Kraven a real Punisher: War Zone vibe as its cornball family soap opera meets zany crime thriller plot gets spiced up with semi-regular interludes of finely staged bloody violence. Watching overqualified actors (Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott, Alessandro Nivola-who kind of runs away with the movie with his cartoonish weirdo dweeb take on the classic-ish Spider-Man villain The Rhino) overact their way through a nonsensical story that doesn't seem overly invested in anything other than finding a way to loosely tie its collection of mismatched characters together just hits a little bit harder when the character's use salty language and can slit somebody's throat at a moment's notice. Honestly, if there were more scenes like the Russian prison-set cold open, the foot/car chase scene through the streets of London and the climactic forest fight, this probably could've hit the same level of debased schlocky fun as the aforementioned War Zone instead of the mildly entertaining blast of unwieldy cheese this it manages to be for most of its running time.   

Look, I understand that a lot of people won't be able to find the fun in Kraven the Hunter like I did. It's an exceptionally silly, comically unfocused movie that's not "good" in any traditional sense. I just refuse to come out and shit all over a movie that takes so much pleasure in being ridiculous. Even if Sony follows through on their promise to continue this particular universe, this brand of superhero movie is almost certainly on its last legs as audiences continue to become fickler with which entries in this genre they venture out to the theaters to see, so I'm just going to enjoy watching a minor triumph in bonehead cinema like Kraven before its kind goes completely extinct.                             

Grade: B-