As the year dies down, there are still a few notable titles that have yet to be released amid the 2024 movie schedule. Sony’s Kraven the Hunter, which sees Aaron Taylor-Johnson play the titular role, is such a film. This R-rated installment in Sony’s expanded cinematic Spider-Man universe has been much-discussed and, per recent comments from producers, it could be the last entry in the franchise (at least for a while). Now, critics have finally screened the comic book flick and, needless to say, they’re not holding back their thoughts.
One could certainly say that Sony’s line of big-screen Spidey offshoots has seen more valleys than peaks. Just this year alone, Madame Web opened to negative reviews and little fanfare at the box office, while Venom: The Last Dance pulled in some cash but was also largely panned. So how does the Aaron Taylor-Johnson-fronted flick stack up to its predecessors? Well, CinemaBlend’s own Eric Eisenberg explained in his own Kraven review that it surpasses the former two films in some ways, but there are a number of issues:
It’s not an unending chain of bad decisions like Madame Web, and there is a storytelling logic that is absent from all of the Venom films, but there is so little substance to any of Kraven The Hunter that you get the sense that it became R-rated to give the work even a modicum of flavor. There is nothing engaging about the characters or the performances, the plot is excessively rote and familiar, and it has nothing to contribute to the ever-expanding genre. It’s inoffensive, but also not worth anybody’s time – from the comic book obsessives to the casual movie-goers just looking for some dumb big screen entertainment on a December weekend.
From the outside looking in, there seemed to be a few appealing elements to this upcoming superhero movie. There’s the promise of intense action and gore (as teased in the Kraven trailers), the prospect of seeing Marvel characters like Rhino and Chameleon and of course, there’s the sheer physicality of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who got fit AF to play the eponymous antihero. Despite all of that, THR’s David Rooney asserts that the movie fails to impress:
…those 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.
The J.C. Chandor-directed film centers around feared hunter Kraven – whose real name is Sergei Kravinoff – who seeks to travel the globe in an attempt to track down the greatest prey imaginable while wrestling with personal demons. Ariana DeBose, Alessandro Nivola, Fred Hechinger, Christopher Abbott and Russell Crowe also star in the film. Lyvie Scott of Inverse can see promise within the overall plot but, in her estimation, the movie is hampered by too many issues:
A clunky, crowded script, muddy visual effects, and glaringly obvious ADR bog down a promising premise. It’s not camp enough to become a cult classic, and it lacks the conviction to carry its most ambitious ideas to the finish line. In a world where superhero fatigue makes competition all the tougher, it’s survival of the fittest — and it’s ironic that Kraven, of all properties, lacks that killer instinct.
Not everyone was less than pleased with this latest superhero offering, though. FilmInk critic Cain Noble-Davies offers some complimentary sentiments to share about it. While he grades the film on a curve proportional to the films that preceded it, Noble-Davies argues that there’s some charm to be found:
In 2024, they unleashed the soulless Madame Web, and bid farewell to Venom: The Last Dance; where they go from there, and whether anyone would care, is up in the air. When graded on that curve, Kraven the Hunter’s rudimentary but mostly effective Russian mobster spin on one of Spidey’s classic rogues finds itself on decent footing. Extraneous sequel-prepping is kept to a minimum (save for a denouement that might as well have been just another post-credits scene), there’s enough meat on the bones of the reworked characters, and it’s refreshing that this actually attempts to say something beyond just smashing toys together.
Still, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich doesn’t mince words when discussing the shortcomings of Sony’s latest Spidey-adjacent effort. What seems to boggle his mind most were the creative decisions as well as the aesthetic that he compares to the superhero films of the early 2000s:
Immune to fan response, impervious to quality control, and so broadly unencumbered by its place in a shared universe that most of its scenes don’t even feel like they take place in the same film, ‘Kraven the Hunter’ might be very, very bad (and by ‘might be’ I mean ‘almost objectively is’), but the more relevant point is that it feels like it was made by people who have no idea what today’s audiences might consider as ‘good.’ If you told me that ‘Elektra’ was the only superhero movie that Chandor had ever seen before directing this one, I would believe you without hesitation — if only because it might help to explain why all of the CGI in ‘Kraven’ looks the same as it would have in 2005.
Based on these reviews, one gets the feeling that Sony’s widely debated Spider-Man Universe is ending on a low note. Of course, general audiences have yet to see the film for themselves, and there’s always the chance that they might feel differently. They can check out Kraven the Hunter when it opens in theaters on December 13.
