Kraven The Hunter

An origin story, Kraven the Hunter delves into the early years of Sergei Kravinoff, a man with a complex relationship with his father, Nikolai Kravinoff, who runs a vast criminal empire. Driven by a desire to prove himself and protect the natural world, Sergei becomes one of the world’s most feared hunters.

Kraven The Hunter Review

Channeling some of the worst that early 2000s comic book movies had to offer, Kraven The Hunter is an uninspired, unremarkable superhero action flick featuring surprisingly little action and not much of a superhero.

Among the many foundational flaws in the film, the titular character has been so reimagined that it only superficially resembles the Kraven from the source material. He possesses a powerset similar to his progenitor, shares his names, and hunts, but the similarities end there.

Gone is the egomaniacal villain who, grown bored hunting the deadliest animals of the world, sets his sights upon superheroes like Spider-Man. Now, Kraven is a PETA-level animal lover who, like Tom Hardy’s Venom, has been transformed into an avenging angel anti-hero with a particular hatred of organized crime and poachers. Unlike the murderous black space goo and his BFF, whose antics were fun for one movie, had their moments in the next, and we don’t need to talk about Venom: The Last Dance, Kraven’s absolute milk toast copy-and-paste plot, mimeographed characters, and endless shots of Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Blue Steel and Orgasmo hero posses run out of gas before the end of the first act.

Combine all of the above with countless sit and speaks in which Kraven and a secondary character arrest any momentum that the film had with Star Wars prequel-like pontifications and exposition dumps and the least imaginative use of superpowers since Zan turned into a bucket of water and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a two hour snooze.

WOKE ELEMENTS

PETA Certified

• I believe in being a good steward of the planet as much as the next guy, and I think that poaching for trophies is wrong. That said, Kraven brutally murders a group of men whose only crime (of which he’s aware) is illegally killing a bunch of deer and being rude. Of course, the movie’s perspective is that he’s completely justified in doing so. That they are low-level thugs In a vast criminal enterprise is incidental, as it is discovered after the murder.
• Unlike every iteration of the comics in his 60 year history, this version of Kraven only hunts people and is, in fact, partially motivated to do so because of the death of a particular big game animal really hurt his feelings. He is a hero right out of a soy-chomping PETA fantasy. That said, he doesn’t get sanctimonious about it and there are no lessons about animal cruelty being taught.