As we now know from this week, we’re entering the end of the Spider-Man Supervillain universe movie, and we finally have one of the most absurd – Kraven the Hunter. A character that rarely ever has stories outside of Spider-Man has his own movie. A movie that, from commonsense, was originally a synergy movie so that it came out when the character was also in the amazingly crafted and expensive Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5 last year but pushed back because of strikes, we now have this major entry into cinematic history. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven the Hunter, in his third time playing a different superhero/villain in the last 14 years, along with being a homie of Godzilla. Sergei has father issues and takes them out on the world by protecting wildlife and nature from terrible poachers. He also decides to kill criminals and drug dealers because of his daddy issues. Kraven has superpowers to make him the best hunter in the world; after getting mauled by a huge CG lion, a young girl named Calypso pours some secret potion she got from her grandmother into his mouth along with the blood from the lion, making him essentially LION-MAN. Lion-Man can do everything a Lion can.
Kraven the Lion-Man feels guilty about one thing – leaving his soft little brother with their terrible toxic masculinity avatar father. His little brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is everything Sergei isn’t; he cowers and sings along with being able to impersonate anyone’s voice. Their father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe), desperately wants his elder son, the badass Lion-Man, back in his life to take over his Russian Crime Lord business. This familial conflict is interrupted by an ego-bruised lameo, Aleksei Sytsevich, played by Alessandro Nivola, who wants to take Nikolai’s business cause he said he was weak AF. Those who read too many comic books and know this name know that he is another Spider-Man villain – The Rhino and this interpretation is way better than the one we got in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Through this, Sergei the LION-MAN has one ally, and it’s the adult Calypso, played by Ariana DeBose, with nothing more to do than look great in black dresses with 80s-style shoulder pads. It’s the point when she enters the movie where the movie ends up feeling like a new CBS drama pilot where we have the main character wanting to go and find bad guys to stop but needs a brilliant and beautiful woman who works a high-end job to help him find those bad guys along with having the will they won’t they attraction. Hey, Sony, maybe you should’ve saved this for a streaming show. I’m just saying.
I bet that, reading this, you’re thinking I will give this movie a bad rating, and you’re wrong. I was entertained by this movie, not in a “it’s so bad it’s good” but legitimately. It’s a throwback type of movie that uses this superhero comic book character in a very retro way as well. This movie feels like a Marvel Comics miniseries from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. It is something you’d pick up with cool-looking art, badass action, and a familiar character doing something different than you expect. While that’s not for everyone, from those who only know this stuff from movies to those older folks who are a bit too dogmatic in what they think is how the comics were through nostalgia versus how they were in reality, Kraven the Hunter scratches that itch more than most of these movies. I’m not here to tell you that the script is great or even good because it’s not. There are some really laughably absurd lines in this, delivered completely deadpan and seriously as they should. There is some bad green screen compositing in this, too, but again, did I see a Kraven have a trap to split a man down the middle the longways – yes, I did. Russel Crowe hamming it up with his Russian accent, calling men weak, and showing random tall grass in the film is peak meta-joking here. If this is how this whole Spider RogueVerse ends, at least it ends on a higher note, as Kraven the Hunter is the best one of these outside of the first Venom movie. The only sad thing is that we won’t get Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock to interact with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven. I’m buying this movie, y’all. I’m watching this Kraven the Hunter over and over again. In a world without Spider-Man, Lion-Man will save us all!
Score: C+
