On purpose or not, everything eventually comes to an end, up to and including ill-conceived, poorly received, commercially unsuccessful series, franchises, and so-called cinematic universes.
For the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), that day will surely come, likely sooner rather than later (i.e., next year), but for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), that day has finally arrived. Confirming the merciful end of its long-floundering live-action universe, Sony’s blindly profit-drive efforts to capitalize on Marvel’s multi-billion-dollar grosses conclude with the much-delayed J.C. Chandor-directed, Aaron Taylor-Johnson-starring Kraven the Hunter, a sub-mediocre, sub-banal, ultimately disposable supervillain origin story minus the character's greatest foe/reason for existing, Spider-Man.
Originally set for release last year, Kraven the Hunter centers on the title character, Sergei Kravinoff / Kraven (Taylor-Johnson, Nosferatu, The Avengers, Kick-Ass), the wayward son of a ruthless Russian oligarch, Nikolai Kravinoff (Oscar-winner Russell Crowe). Morally and ethically opposed to his father’s personal preference for violence, intimidation, and exploitation as a business philosophy, the teenaged Sergei we meet in an overlong, over-indulgent flashback (Levi Miller), finds himself powerless to do anything except follow his father and younger, equally-as-unhappy brother, Dmitri (Billy Barratt), on a hunting trip in Africa.
One almost deadly encounter with an alpha lion later, Sergei almost loses his life, the prey to an apex predator. In a clumsy plot development, Sergei only survives thanks to the intervention of the American-born Calypso (Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose as an adult) and Calypso’s grandmother, a native witch of some kind with access to a near-miraculous healing potion. Sergei doesn’t just survive otherwise devastating, fatal wounds, but thanks to the screenplay-stretching possibilities of the magic potion, Sergei emerges from his hospital bed armed with super-strength, enhanced senses, and a keen desire to right the world’s wrongs, mostly, if almost exclusively, by pursuing globe-trotting vigilantism against the worst of the worst criminals (his father excluded, of course).
What starts promisingly enough with the title character in super-sized action, infiltrating a barbaric Russian state prison to locate and eliminate an incarcerated gang-boss, almost immediately devolves into a tiresome slog, first hitting the flashback button for almost half an hour, then shuffling back to the present-day and Kraven’s awkward reunion with a now adult Calypso in London (he proposes a team-up for … reasons) before the plot proper finally kicks in. His father’s longtime enemy, Aleksei Sytsevich aka "The Rhino" (Alessandro Nivola, delivering a bizarre, off-putting performance), eager to prove himself, kidnaps a semi-grown-up Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), a sometime lounge singer blessed and/or cursed with the seemingly non-useful gift for imitating singing and talking voices, including (you guessed it), his father.
In addition to Sytsevich’s faceless henchmen, Kraven also must face off against another comic-book-styled villain, the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, wasted in a redundant role), a mercenary with voice skills of his own: he can hypnotize his targets into momentarily freezing or falling into a trance. Moments later, he dispatches them through the usual assortment of violent implements (e.g., guns, knives, his hands). A tracker somewhat like Kraven, the Foreigner (awful, no-good, terrible name) finds himself always one step behind his prey, right up until the plot necessitates the expected face-off with Kraven.
Created as a Spider-Man villain back in the day, Kraven suffers mightily from the absence of his principal, super-powered antagonist. Apart from his standoff with the murkily defined Foreigner in the third act, Kraven rarely breaks a sweat, climbing skyscraping superstructures with abandon, slipping stealthily into his quarry’s lair, and dispatching a virtually endless supply of henchmen with periodic spurts of CGI blood and occasional, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gore. Without a visible threat or even the possibility of one, Kraven’s hunt-and-slash antics quickly devolve into pure tedium.
Almost as importantly and arguably even worse, the patchwork screenplay credited to Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway saddles every character with cringe-inducing, repetitive dialogue. Crowe’s oligarch can’t stop talking about prey and predators. Calypso’s one and only scene with her grandmother in the overstuffed flashback features not just ineptly delivered exposition, but her grandmother’s bizarre fixation with slipping Calypso’s name into every sentence.
That doesn’t save Calypso from functioning as purely ornamental and extraneous to the plot. The woefully structured script turns Dmitri into an irritating, sniveling failson, perpetually reliant on his older brother to save him from any scrape, his eventual fate utterly predictable, not to mention borrowed from the far superior MCU entry, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Directed by borderline competent anonymity by the otherwise talented Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost, Margin Call), the obligatory action set pieces unfold with a minimum of tension and a maximum of annoyingly under-rendered CGI, the latter the likely result of Sony cutting corners to save production costs, all but undermining the already slim chances of Kraven the Hunter recouping any part of its budget at the box office this holiday season.
Kraven the Hunter opens December 15, only in movie theaters, via Sony Pictures.