Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.
Kraven the Hunter has been an exotic, marginal figure in the Spider-Man part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but now he gets his own film and Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays him as an ultra-muscly super predator with Spidey’s skill in whooshing up and down buildings and a sense for something amiss – although the great arachnid himself does not appear. Kraven thinks of human beings as the only worthy game (that is: bad people who deserve what’s coming to them) and despises people who presume to kill noble beasts. Taylor-Johnson himself gets to fearlessly wrestle with a few digital big cats.
This is his origin story – as a teenager Sergei Kravinoff (played as a youth by Levi Miller) is taken on an African safari by his bullying, overbearing Russian oligarch father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) whose cruelty has already driven their mother to take her own life – along with his adored half-brother Dmitri, whose only talent is chameleonic mimicry (played by Billy Barratt, and later as an adult by Fred Hechinger).
A lion almost kills young Sergei but is restrained, perhaps, by his innate lion-ish respect for Sergei’s nobility – and like Crocodile Dundee with the water buffalo, Sergei actually seemed to be on the point of subduing the animal with his commanding-yet-empathetic gaze, before Nikolai started shooting. A drop of lion blood mysteriously transforms Sergei, along with a potion from Sergei’s future friend-slash-love interest Calypso – a ridiculous and borderline patronising role for Ariana DeBose. Sergei becomes king predator Kraven (the origin of the name is left unexplored) and his chief enemy, apart from his impossible and brutish old dad is cringing beta male Aleksei (Alessandro Nivola) with a nerdy backpack and glasses which make him look like billionaire Khodorkovsky. He has consumed a chemical compound which transforms him, entirely absurdly, into arch-nemesis The Rhino.
This involved, laborious story takes us to Siberia, London and Turkey before finally winding down to the predictable conspiracist twist-finish. As Kraven, Taylor-Johnson gives us an Americanised English accent – puzzling, as his dad and brother have the ryegulation Ryussian accyent – and he is developing a not unattractive faintly Roger Moore facial expression of wry dismissal (it could get him the 007 gig) but there is nothing particularly funny or smart in the script for him to get his teeth into.
Fred Hechinger has the marginally more interesting role but Crowe upstages them both. JC Chandor, whose credits include directing the fascinating near-silent jeopardy drama with Robert Redford All Is Lost, in 2013, does a serviceable job, but the delirious craziness that once made the superhero genre so watchable is not really in evidence. Kraven is a so-so character in a so-so film and the superhero revival is as far away as ever.