Kraven the Hunter

The Animal in the Corporate Machine

I spent a good chunk of *Kraven the Hunter* wondering what, exactly, J.C. Chandor thought he had signed up for. This is the director of *Margin Call* and *A Most Violent Year*, films built on moral corrosion, restraint, and men quietly destroying each other in rooms with expensive furniture. Here, he's making a movie where a man gets his powers because mystical lion blood seeps into his wounds. It's a wild career turn. Even after the credits, I couldn't decide whether it was bold or just baffling.



The Sony Spider-Man Universe—a franchise that appears to keep lurching forward through pure executive insistence—has not exactly inspired confidence. After the fiasco of *Madame Web*, *Kraven* tries to correct course with more blood, more grit, more R-rated seriousness. Aaron Taylor-Johnson commits hard as Sergei Kravinoff. He doesn't enter scenes so much as prowl into them, shoulders pitched forward, jaw locked, every movement suggesting a man tired of being himself. He has the body of a superhero statue, but he carries it like dead weight.



The early safari sequence tells you what kind of father-son damage the movie wants to mine. Young Sergei is attacked by a lion while his father, Nikolai, looks on with disgust rather than fear. Russell Crowe plays him with a huge Russian accent that teeters right on the edge of camp, but the scene itself is nasty enough to work. Chandor shoots the attack with genuine solemnity, using the vast African landscape to make Nikolai's cruelty feel even colder. For a minute, the film seems interested in the psychic wound that shapes Sergei. Then the lion's blood fuses with him and the whole thing snaps back toward franchise business.



That split is the movie's real problem. It keeps lunging toward serious family trauma, then getting yanked into CGI supervillain mayhem. One scene is about generational abuse; the next has Alessandro Nivola turning into a digital Rhino while the movie dissolves into generic effects sludge. Ariana DeBose, meanwhile, does what she can with Calypso, though the script gives her almost no room to exist as a person. Chandor tries to keep Kraven's violence tactile and animal, and sometimes the hand-to-hand combat has a rough physical snap to it, but the movie never escapes the machinery wrapped around it.

Maybe the anti-hero origin story has simply burned through its last reserves. *Kraven the Hunter* isn't a total catastrophe, but it does feel like two incompatible movies wrestling in the same frame: an anxious character study and a studio product with brand obligations. I walked out mostly feeling sorry for the lion—and a little drained.