Critics have their claws out for Kraven the Hunter. Reviews for the R-rated Sony’s Spider-Man Universe movie, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the iconic Marvel villain, were released on Wednesday — one day before it’s due in theaters — and it sounds like critics weren’t game for the third SSU movie this year after Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance.
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Kraven debuted with just a 15% approval from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the franchise’s sixth consecutive “rotten” on the review aggregator website. Metascore currently sits at 33% from 24 reviews, indicating a “generally unfavorable” critical reception.
As Sony sunsets its universe of Spider-Man characters, the SSU ends with an average score of 28% on Rotten Tomatoes. 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage received the best score of the six-movie franchise — a still-rotten 58% — followed by 2024’s Venom: The Last Dance at 41% and 2018’s Venom at 30%. Kraven the Hunter has tied 2022’s Morbius at 15%, just above the much-reviled Madame Web at 11%.
[RELATED: Sony’s Kraven the Hunter Tracking to Open Below Bomb Madame Web at the Box Office]
The criticism includes complaints of “cringe-worthy” dialogue and “embarrassingly poor performances” from the cast, which includes Oscar winners Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) and Russell Crowe (Gladiator). The script, by Punisher: War Zone and Uncharted scribes Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, drew unfavorable comparisons to the other SSU installments from producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, namely that it’s “scattered” and “crowded” with characters like Calypso (DeBose), the Chameleon (Fred Hechinger), and fellow Spider-Man villain the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola). The latter, who last appeared as a machine monstrosity in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, suffers from poor VFX, per the reviews rounded up below.
The Hollywood Reporter: “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.”
Polygon: “Kraven the Hunter is the dull death knell for Sony’s Spider-Man spinoffs … utterly perplexing, from its existence to its execution. But that doesn’t make it fun to watch. In fact, it might be 2024’s most weightless Hollywood studio movie, both physically and emotionally. Based on yet another Spider-Man arch-nemesis, it joins Madame Web, Morbius, and the Venom trilogy in Sony’s bizarre attempt to get some kind of Spidey series or universe off the ground without Peter Parker himself. For a delicious comic baddie like Kraven, a big-game hunter whose entire ethos revolves around killing Spider-Man, divorcing him from his nemesis is a tall task, and one Chandor’s movie absolutely isn’t up to.”
Variety: “Kraven, as played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in longish hair and a beard but not much else that really distinguishes him (he’s ripped! who isn’t?), is a rather antsy superhero (or, technically, supervillain), full of broodish angst. But the less polite way of putting it is that he seems like the third-tier superhero he is, just like Morbius or Madame Web. The action in Kraven the Hunter is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you … I’ve seen much worse comic-book movies than Kraven, but maybe the best way to sum up my feelings about the film is to confess that I didn’t stay to see if there’s a post-credits teaser.”
Total Film: “Though closer in quality to Morbius than Venom, Kraven is far from a catastrophe and serves up a decent helping of bloodthirsty, globe-trotting action. Taylor-Johnson makes a muscular if self-satisfied protagonist in a film that would have been better off standing on its own shoeless feet than cravenly (or should that be, ‘kravenly’) cleaving itself to its comic book brethren.”
Vulture: “‘A movie no one asked for’ isn’t criticism so much as a clear-eyed assessment of Kraven the Hunter’s fundamental issue: It’s based on a deep-cut comic-book character who isn’t recognizable enough to be a draw on his own, starring an actor of unreliable charisma who also isn’t a draw on his own and who’s frankly more fun in a supporting role as a priggish skeptic in Nosferatu than he is parkouring through London barefoot here. As a Spider-Man antagonist, Kraven would be an oddball addition to an established world, but as the focus of a whole movie, he’s like a decorative pillar suddenly tasked with holding up a house.”
IndieWire: “The special effects in Kraven the Hunter are bad enough to completely undercut the only decent setpiece — a chase through the streets and rivers of London — in an action movie that doesn’t take advantage of its R rating until the final shootout, as the CGI devolves from ‘adorably cartoonish’ to ‘done as cheaply as possible by a studio trying to cut its losses’ so fast that it comes dangerously close to Scorpion King territory by the end (which doesn’t stop [director] Chandor from burdening the effects with selling his story’s most pivotal moments).”
Den of Geek: “The movie is so vacuous, so bereft of life in spite of its many desperate and quality actors trying to quicken the cadaver with wasted energy, that it eerily resembles the cobbled together emptiness of the worst 2000s superhero time-wasters. Then again, Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman previously oversaw production on the lowest common denominator nerd baubles of yesteryear like X-Men Origins: Wolverine while producer Avi Arad was producer on train wrecks of that era like Elektra and Ghost Rider, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising Kraven the Hunter feels like a throwback to the days where ‘fan service’ was something done through gritted teeth.”
Insession: “The film suffers from cringe-worthy dialogue, occasionally hysterically bad special effects (Kraven’s friends, the water buffaloes, have the look of a Lindt Milk Chocolate Holiday Bunny), and even some embarrassingly poor performances from Academy Award-winning and otherwise respected actors … Johnson is one of the most talented actors in the world, but the film and sound editors do him no favors, allowing him to ham it up here. His performance is so over the top, it’s almost laughable. The same goes for Alessandro Nivola, who was excellent in The Art of Self-Defense and The Many Saints of Newark but plays the Rhino so inconsistently that his portrayal feels disjointed. Yes, he’s playing a psychopathic villain, but the character’s uneven shifts are so erratic they come off as practically schizophrenic. Even Ariana DeBose is left standing awkwardly in one scene, showing no fear, shock, or even surprise when a leopard attacks Sergei, as if such events are an everyday occurrence in a courtroom.”
Mashable: “Kraven the Hunter was originally scheduled to premiere in January of 2023. Then it was bumped to October 2023. Then it was bumped yet again to August of 2024, and then to December. Finally, the film is coming out, and the delays seem to be explained by the final result — a Frankenstein’s monster of a film with seams that are not only showing, they’re practically protruding from the screen. And yet, I might just love this hot mess of a movie, because for all its failings, it managed something that’s been increasingly difficult as oversaturation drives the superhero story into the ground. Kraven the Hunter is surprising, truly wild, fun, and definitely not for kids.”
Newsday: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chandor’s action sequences don’t quite work: They speed by so quickly, abetted by such obvious CGI, that they rarely make an impact. Not helping is a script, by Richard Wenk and others, that feels both overstuffed and underbaked. Take, for instance, The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), an assassin whose eyes can freeze his enemies. Anyone care to explain how he obtained that power? Or how it works? Alright, forget it and pass the popcorn. In the future, maybe Kraven the Hunter will become a cult favorite, the kind of campy hoot that pops up at midnight movie marathons alongside Flash Gordon and Birdemic. If your appetite for such stuff is bottomless, this Marvel misfire just might satisfy.”
Associated Press: “If Crowe is cartoonish to the point of parody, Alessandro Nivola as a human-rhino hybrid makes him look like Sir Laurence Olivier. There are few instances of someone overacting more in a movie, unnecessarily adding an undercurrent of murderous, jokey psychotic to an already bizarre creation. The costume department has also dropped the ball here, giving The Rhino a small, stringed backpack that looks like it was found in the discount bins at Kohl’s. Two good actors — Fred Hechinger as Kraven’s younger brother and Ariana DeBose as his lawyer-ally — are left marooned in a movie that tumbles and slips to a unsatisfactory end. Is Kraven a hero or a villain? Who cares? Without Spider-Man, what’s really the point, right?”
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, and Russell Crowe, Kraven the Hunter is in theaters Thursday.