‘Kraven the Hunter’ Review: Aaron Taylor-Johnson Brings the Brawn but Can’t Muscle Up the Excitement in Turgid Marvel Origin Story

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.

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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. He’s introduced (in an eight-minute opening sequence released online by Sony earlier this month) arriving with a busload of new inmates at a remote, snowbound prison to the blustery strains of Basil Poledouris’ Russian choral anthem, “Hymn to Red October,” from some Sean Connery submarine movie.

Kraven wastes no time showing the prison-yard heavies he’s not to be messed with. That gets him summoned to the office of crime boss Seymon Chorney (Yuri Kolokolnikov), whom he proceeds to kill with a saber tooth extracted from the tiger rug on the floor. His daring escape has him scrambling up walls, bounding over roofs and jumping from great heights, with what seems more like animal agility than mere human strength.

We get to the root of that physical prowess once the action rewinds 16 years to when Kraven, then known by his birth name, Sergei Kravinoff, and his half-brother Dmitri (played as teenagers by Levi Miller and Billy Barratt, respectively) are pulled out of school in New York by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe).

If you enjoyed Crowe’s cheesy accent in The Pope’s Exorcist, he serves up another winner here as the Russian drug kingpin, who unceremoniously informs his sons that their mother is dead. “She took own life. She was weak.” (He’s not big on pronouns or articles.)

Suicide nixes a church funeral, so Nikolai takes the boys big game-hunting in Northern Ghana instead because, well, why not? Lots of macho blather follows about Sergei and Dmitri being soft and needing to become men. Nikolai intends to show them how by killing a legendary lion that has eluded hunters for decades. “Man who kill legend becomes legend,” he tells them, at least getting one verb right. But that encounter doesn’t go as planned, leaving Sergei badly mauled and near death.

Also in Ghana is the young Calypso, talking tarot with her mystic grandmother, who gives her a special cure-all potion that bestows strange powers and tells her she’ll know when to use it. Naturally, Sergei is the lucky recipient. The potion, along with a drop or two of lion’s blood, brings him back to life after being pronounced dead. He wakes up with luminous amber lion eyes and heightened senses.  

As if that laborious set-up wasn’t enough, we’re also introduced to Russian mercenary Aleksei Sytsevich — played by Alessandro Nivola, who gets some gonzo kicks out of the role, but deserves better. He cozies up to Nikolai, suggesting they become partners, but is rudely rebuffed, possibly because he’s wearing Javier Bardem’s old hair from No Country for Old Men. He will resurface later with a better haircut and a freakish transformative ability whenever he unplugs a tube pumping fluids into him from a tiny backpack. Good luck figuring out how that works.  

Aleksei eventually explains that he signed up for genetic experimentation with a New York professor named Miles Warren — Marvel obsessives might know him as the Jackal — and what’s a little excruciating pain compared to a tenfold increase in strength? The scientist is unseen in this film, but you can bet he’ll have at least one other guinea pig eager for a mutant makeover. Hint: Dmitri, played in later years by Fred Hechinger, sings Black Sabbath’s “Changes” in his ritzy London piano bar.

Back in the present day, Kraven has a list of evil dudes to kill, Chorney having been one of them. He tracks down Calypso, enlisting her help to find the fiends. Kraven also wrestles with his guilt over abandoning Dmitri to their overbearing father when he fled rather than comply with the old man’s wish for him to take over the family crime business. Dmitri, who has an uncanny gift for impersonation, is desperate for poppa’s approval but seems unlikely to get it by running a piano bar, even if Nikolai loves hearing him do Tony Bennett. (I’m not making this up.)

As the trailer revealed, Aleksei becomes the Rhino, plotting to take over Nikolai’s empire and kill Kraven. “When a rhino sees his opportunity, he charges in and takes it,” he says. That opportunity presents itself in puny Dmitri, whose kidnapping proves a perfect lure. Just to make the scenario even more convoluted, Rhino hires Turkish tough guy Ömer Aksoy (Murat Seven) and a mysterious assassin known only as the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, wasted), with an ability to vanish for seconds at a time that’s never explained.

Since Kraven has the speed of a cheetah, the strength of a lion and the grace of a cat, he’s superhero-adjacent, meaning he can scale buildings, chase down an airborne helicopter while dangling from a rope ladder and bust his way into a bulletproof vehicle at high speed by ripping off a door. He’s also simpatico enough with the animal kingdom to command a stampeding bison herd. Taylor-Johnson does many of his own stunts, but these days, if you’re under 40 and you don’t, you just seem lazy. Blame Tom Cruise.

The action hops from the streets of London to a monastery outside Ankara to Kraven’s Siberian taiga hideout, where Calypso puts her summer camp archery skills to good use with a crossbow. But despite the many smackdowns and the elevated body count, the story never builds momentum. It has too little internal logic for that. Even ultimate confrontations like Kraven’s with Nikolai have minimal impact, and if there’s meant to be sexual tension between Kraven and Calypso, I couldn’t discern it.

Chandor established himself as a versatile director with Margin Call, All is Lost and A Most Violent Year before making the starry heist thriller Triple Frontier (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal), which reportedly drew monster viewership on Netflix, but like most streaming originals, left zero cultural footprint. Not to deny anyone a fat Marvel paycheck, but here, Chandor seems either out of his depth or unengaged.

Mostly, the drab-looking, sluggish movie seems to exist to lay groundwork for future installments in which over-qualified actors like DeBose and Hechinger might be given more to do and Kraven’s vigilantism might have a clearer sense of purpose. Or, now that he’s got that Viking-chic fur-trimmed vest to strike the iconic pose in, perhaps he’ll turn more unequivocally villainous? But those are all big maybes in a movie that doesn’t exactly scream, “Sequel!”