Snack Attack: Kraven The Hunter Is More Empty Calorie Superhero Slop
The existential fear among creatives is that one day, artificial intelligence will become so good that a data-generated movie would be indistinguishable from the real thing. Sadly, that day may have already arrived, though not in the way tech bros have envisioned. Living deep within a soul draining uncanny valley, Kraven The Hunter is a dead-on-arrival origin story of the Spider-Verse villain. The glassy-eyed picture moves like an automaton, assembling the expected parts of a big budget superhero movie, but with none of the emotion, dimension, or oxygen that would indicate any number of human beings were involved in its production. Indeed, if this is what $130 million buys you these days, why not let a computer take the reins?
The first half of this interminable picture is largely devoted to the all important Lore and Backstory. It goes something like this: once upon a time Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor Johnson, jacked) got mauled by a big cat, nearly died, and thanks to lion’s blood and a magic potion he can now summon the power of animals and do parkour. With his newfound skills, he spends his days ridding the world of gangsters like his dad (Russell Crowe, Russian accent). But eventually karma comes kicking in when some baddies — Rhino (Alessandro Nivola, interesting) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, sunglasses) — use Sergei’s crooner brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger, innocent) as bait to lure Kraven into a trap. But with the help of an archery inclined lawyer Calypso (Ariana DeBose, miscast) Kraven springs into action.
Ostensibly written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film moves through each scene and every story beat so perfunctorily and unimaginatively, it begs the question if they were working off a standardized script template. As for J.C. Chandor, he unfortunately becomes yet another victim of an auteur rendered unrecognizable by the IP slop machine. None of the filmmaker’s energy, visual sense, or facility with dramatic tension evidenced in pictures like Margin Call, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier is found in any frame of Kraven The Hunter. Longtime Marvel cinematographer Ben Davis (Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel) doesn’t help matters. Flat and bright as if shot more for familiarity than style, you could substitute any superhero you wanted into any frame and there would be no fundamental difference.
Let’s just call Kraven The Hunter for what it is: an exercise in everyone involved getting paid. There’s no shame in it, and there’s no doubt the team came to the project with the best intentions to make something genuinely engaging. But no matter what promises might’ve been made by Sony, no matter the emphasis that this movie was apparently “shot entirely on location” (it surely wasn’t), and no matter the film’s uninspired flex of bloody R-rated violence, once fed into the engine of branding, IP management, and corporate quarterly earnings, it has come out the other side as a reliably faceless product that will fill two hours of somebody’s next airplane ride.
At this point in the era of superhero movies, it would serve audiences and studios alike to drop the pretense that any effort is being made to break the mold. Certainly, even film critics would welcome the relief of having to futilely engage with these movies under the notion that any kind of craftsmanship is taking place. Kraven The Hunter is an assembly line production. It’s another can of soda or bag of chips that serve their function as an item of commerce that must, foremost, be easily and globally identifiable. This time around, the flavor is off and the label is misleading, but don’t worry, in a few months another one will be coming along the conveyor belt, with a tweaked formula and shiny new wrapping.
Reviewed on December 11th at the 2024 Red Sea International Film Festival (4th edition). 127 mins.
★/☆☆☆☆☆
