'Kraven the Hunter' Stalks into Theaters This Weekend
by EG
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has struggled lately to live up to its former glory, and the latest second-tier installment will hit theaters this week in a very challenging environment. Kraven the Hunter is unlikely to recharge the faltering superhero genre, given that it features no well-known characters or especially beloved comic-book lore. Read on for details.
There’s an amusing moment midway through the punishingly dull Kraven the Hunter, in which Ariana DeBose — playing a high-powered lawyer linked to a pileup of gangster killings, who flees a team of hitmen in her London office and lands in Siberia — says with a straight face, “I don’t like the feel of this at all.” No kidding. The scene probably wasn’t intended for laughs, but it nonetheless makes you wish director J.C. Chandor and the writers had committed to the silliness of this muddled Marvel villain origin story with a touch more winking humor.
Instead, those hints of a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure are a fleeting tease in an action thriller that spills plenty of blood but never raises the temperature or ignites the excitement. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his rock-hard abs play the title character with impressive physicality and ace knife skills, but he’s too wooden to have any fun with it. Overlong and punctuated by anticlimactic kills of one bad guy after another, this looks to follow other entries in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe like Morbius and Madame Web to an early grave.
Originally scheduled for a January 2023 release, the film was pushed back three times — delays which don’t appear to have been used to polish the shoddy CG work — and is now making an optimistic play for Christmas counterprogramming traction.
Fanboys are an unpredictable lot, but despite requisite nods to Marvel lore and appearances by Spider-Man antagonists Rhino, the Foreigner and the Chameleon, without the webslinger these foes are not all that interesting. Just the fact that DeBose’s character, Calypso, has gone from being a Spidey-baiting Haitian voodoo priestess with a zombie slave-trade sideline in the comics to a slick attorney is an indication of how little vitality screenwriters Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway mine from the material.
Once you subtract the Spider-Man obsession, it’s unclear exactly what kind of antihero Kraven is meant to be.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.