End Game
Yeah, it’s not great, but there’s been much worse this year. Looking at you, ‘Borderlands’.
Kraven the Hunter
Director: JC Chandor • Writers: Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger
USA • 2hrs 7mins
Opens Hong Kong Dec 12 • IIB
Grade: B-
I don’t know about you, but I like Aaron Taylor-Johnson a little more each time I see him. He can be much more engaging and daring than he’s given credit for – check out his outdoor toilet-using redneck in Nocturnal Animals, or as Scottish independence leader James Douglas in Outlaw King, and bonus, he’s in Robert Eggers’ forthcoming Nosferatu – so he’s aiming for more than just nerd icon (Kick-Ass) or action star (Godzilla). Rumour has it he’s on the short list to be the next James Bond and yeah. Works for me. So whatever mess Sony’s last kick at the Marvel can Kraven The Hunter may be, it’s not Taylor-Johnson’s fault. In fact, he’s one of its better elements, despite what I can imagine will be the vitriol and unbending resistance to anything by the same machine that gave us Morbius and Madame Web. Morbius was a hot mess. That’s fair. Madame Web was not worse, and no, Kraven is not worse yet again. It’s goofy, a bit sloppy, rote and has the depth of a $10 bill (poaching: bad; crime lords: also bad), but it’s just not the worst film to come from any of Marvel’s various platforms. Have we forgotten Thor: Love and Thunder, Iron Man 2 or the grating fanservice of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which somehow got dubbed “clever” instead of cynical and lazy? Oh, wait. Sorry. It’s Spider-Man. It’s perfect. TFOH with that.
Point is, there’s always worse in someone’s opnion, and at this point in the SSU experiment it’s a crapshoot. Kraven – likely the last in the lab – comes to theatres with a shit ton of baggage: multiple directors, seasonal delays, the SAG-AFTRA strike, franchise competition, on and on. It’s more guilty of trying to spin gold from an obscure character for licensing reasons and wasting a strong cast than of being bad. There’s some hilarious dialogue, some nicely campy delivery. Abs. Whaddaya want from these?
My eyes are up here, people
Sergei and Dmitri Kravinoff are the entitled sons of Russian crime lord Nikolai (a jolly Russell Crowe, continuing his fabulous tour of European accents, after The Pope’s Exorcist), the former the elder son Nikolai is grooming (heh heh) to take over his empire, the latter the product of an affair his wife had. He resents the kid, and appears to resent his wife, too: When she dies, he fetches the boys from their fancy boarding school and takes them big game hunting to “mourn”. Sure dad. Down the road from the Kravinoff’s hunting ground is young Calypso, talking ancient African hoodoo with her grandmother – because Africa – as she waits for her parents to come pick her up for a safari. Blah blah blah, Sergei gets mauled by a lion (100% Team Lion), blah blah blah Calypso’s hoodoo saves him, but it turns him into a Dr Dolittle type, who communes with animals and scales trees and buildings like a cat. Not my loser cat, but similar.
Years later, the adult Sergei is now Kraven (Taylor-Johnson), AKA The Hunter, who’s on a mission to put bad guys – poachers in particular – in the ground. He’s dumped his family, and left poor, sensitive Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, Gladiator II) with their blustery, manly-man father. When rival gang boss and mercenary Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola, absolutely tearing it up) makes moves to take over Nikolai’s territory, Dmitri gets caught in the middle. It just so happens that Aleksei is also Rhino, which I guess is important somehow. Sergei/Kraven tracks down and enlists help from his years-ago saviour Calypso (Ariana DeBose, Argylle), now a lawyer with a side hustle as a hoodoo priestess, and they unravel the complicated power game all these dudes are playing.
Kraven The Hunter is certainly not a masterpiece, but director JC Chandor knows his way around layered storytelling and the loner hero type. He blasted out of the gate with the hat trick of Margin Call, All is Lost and A Most Violent Year, so there was hope Kraven might have found some interesting threads to pull on, but alas the eventual script feels like it has less Richard Wenk (The Equalizers) in it and more Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (dual dreck wrecks Uncharted and Men in Black: International). In fairness it also feels like a pastiche of various other script versions and “ideas” tossed around a boardroom with Sony execs trying to make this work. The tone pinballs from dead serious – and considerably more violent (the forest showdown is delightfully gruesome) than the other SSU films, a missed opportunity for some genre-mashing – to quippy tongue-in-cheek every few minutes, leaving the cast to flail. As stated, Nivola goes to town with Rhino once he loses the busted wig, and he may well be in another movie in his own head, and that’s the one I want to see. DeBose is wasted again, though she looks incredible in her all-black leather lawyer gear, as are Hechinger, who ultimately becomes Chameleon, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him assassin The Foreigner, blandly played by Christopher Abbott (Poor Things), who totally has it in him to get weird. Now, the opening prison break and a car-foot chase through central London are pretty awesome (even if it does end on a Captain America: The Winter Soldier note), and to his credit Taylor-Johnson does not half-ass it; he doesn’t take Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web route, bless her heart. So the SSU experiment ends on a higher dumb note than it could have, and we can be grateful for that. That, and the experiment is likely concluded.