“It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.” - Jean Nidetch
If any of my negative reviews ever seem happy about giving a movie a bad score please know that is never my intention. I hate watching something I don’t enjoy. I want to like everything I see but that simply isn’t realistic. And if anyone has the reputation for producing terrible content, it’s Marvel by Sony. Morbius is just bad but forgettable. Madame Web is so awful it’s downright funny as a result.
And now we have the R rated Kraven the Hunter! Seriously, that was their entire marketing scheme, focusing on the mpaa rating rather than anything to do with the quality, of which there is none. “Is the movie any good? Well… it’s rated R!” Having seen it I can tell you this was intentional. They knew what they had on their hands and turned to the only thing they could, the content being adult in nature. So, Morbius bad, Madame Web awful but funny and Kraven? In the quickest summation I can muster - it is hopelessly boring and clunky in just about every regard. If it was Sony’s goal to hit the trifecta of terribleness, they just hit the target, a third bullseye of mediocrity (at best).
My expectations for Kraven were in the basement, subsistent on rat turds and nightmares. I desperately wanted to help shock the world by revealing how amazing this movie was and that the curse of Sony led Marvel, for the time being, is broken. But it wasn’t meant to be. We live in reality where people rat on the insurance shooter and Kraven the Hunter is yet another monumental failure. There’s a reason they only let us see the movie and no one from the public. They’re bracing right now for the impending wave of pithy, pissed off commentary from people tricked into paying for this thing. Then again people like the Venom trilogy so maybe I’m the asshole and this is the next Marvel hit. My money’s on this being another unsurprising Sony misfire.
I can get by with a flat, uninteresting premise if at the very least the action and violence is worthwhile. It is not. It is, like its story, wholly uninspired and frustratingly forgettable. I’m a huge proponent of leaving phones off or on vibrate and left in one’s pocket for the duration of a movie’s runtime in a public movie theater. But considering my unique circumstances of having no one near me in the back of the theater I was able to check the time without disturbing anyone. I’m telling you this because I couldn’t help but check from time to time how much I had left to endure something as mundane as this movie. And that will be, I believe, the legacy of Kraven the Hunter, a practice in disinterested mundanity.
The story is rushed, constipated and feverishly boring. The characters are one note in constant need to remind us of who they are and why they do the things they do. At least ten times in this movie he mentions that he’s a hunter and that’s what he does. Oh and he does it better than anyone else. Anyone’s name important to the plot is repeated to the point of menace. Which brings us to the dialogue in general featuring some of the most egregiously obvious ADR I’ve ever witnessed. Also present is abysmal accent work particularly from Russell Crowe who has been inexplicably awful as of late and it’s kind of bumming me out if I’m honest. The visuals are horrendous including terribly rendered computer generated imagery that is head scratching at its best.
The villain(s)(?) are a monster man that turns into a rhino and the overbearing psychopathy of a Russian oligarch gangster father to two boys irrevocably damaged by his incessant need to “be a man” constantly bringing up what it means to be a man as often as he embodies the most cliche Russian villain imaginable, vodka and alcoholism very much included. At this point I think Crowe’s negotiations for a role pretty much just state he has no interest in losing weight or participating in any kind of physical activity. If the studio agrees to this he’ll basically do anything they ask. I just watched Gladiator recently in preparation for part two and I cannot believe the man that screamed, “Are you not entertained?!” is the same man delivering his lines in Kraven like it’s Saturday Night Live where he’s seemingly discovering the lines for the very first time as he reads them just off camera.
As for The Rhino, played by Alessandro Nivola, he is barely a threat beyond promising what he’s capable of and never showing it until the very end. He isn’t much in a movie that isn’t much. And then there’s The Foreigner who does some mildly interesting things but never rises beyond it before (spoiler) succumbing to one of the funniest deaths of the movie.
As for the R rating, it does provide some pretty graphic violence and occasional no-no words but it’s nothing we haven’t seen many times before. Look to Logan and Deadpool for your R-rated superhero needs because this isn’t it.
If anything good is in here it’s in the performances by some of the cast who are just trying their best with what they’ve been given. Having just seen Nosferatu I know what Aaron Taylor-Johnson is capable of which only makes this even more disappointing. Crowe is a generational actor seemingly in a state of giving up and it’s hard to watch. He just feels lazy in every aspect of this disastrous movie. It’s greatest strength I believe is how forgettable it is. Madame Web stuck to our psyches like glue because it is almost indescribably bad and because of this leaves a kind of residue in our minds. Kraven the Hunter will hold like a sticky note, one delicate breeze away from falling off the refrigerator and being lost under the fridge soaking up the melted ice cubes you kicked under there. So yeah, Kraven the Hunter is another Sony miscue destined for superhero purgatory until the end of time. I say, let it stay there.
Rated R For: strong bloody violence and language
Runtime: 127 minutes
After Credits Scene: No (seriously, nothing at the end)
Genre: Superhero, Action
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola
Directed By: J.C. Chandor
Out of 10
Story: 4/ Acting: 5/ Directing: 5/ Visuals: 4
OVERALL: 4/10
Buy to Own: No.
Check out the trailer below:
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