Humanising supervillains to convert them into anti-heroes in movie adaptations from comicbooks is a tough job. But Sony has always had the artiste power to pull it off. Time and again, they prove it. And this time is no different with Kraven the Hunter starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, and Alessandro Nivola.
From his first breakthrough role in the 2010 film Kick-Ass to Kraven the Hunter, Aaron Taylor-Johnson seems to be having fun with his comicbook-movie roles. The 34-year-old is no stranger to pop-culture film roles at this point. Back in 2003, the actor portrayed a young Charlie Chaplin in Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Knights.
In Kraven the Hunter, Taylor-Johnson gives his brooding best to his role as the anti-hero Sergei Kravinoff or Kraven, balancing well with Russell Crowe who portrays his estranged father, Nikolai.
The J.C. Chandor movie takes the old Sam Raimi route in bringing Spider-Man characters to the big screen with a twist. Some, like the Green Goblin and Doc Ock, worked, while others, like Venom (in Spider-Man 3), did not. The same goes for the latest entry in Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-verse.
This new version of Kraven lands solidly; the evolution of the Chameleon—Kraven’s half-brother (played by Fred Hechinger)—is interesting but a bit rushed, and Ariana DeBose as the voodoo priestess Calypso is a bit messy. Calypso is a lawyer in London, for some reason, with a “mysterious” penchant for archery—well removed from the comicbook source material where she is a major and brutal power to be reckoned with (without the corporate angle). The curse of adapting Rhino to the big screen continues, yet this version by Alessandro Nivola as Aleksei Sytsevich is a bit more interesting (and bearable) than the last Paul Giamatti rendition.
Christopher Abbott essays the role of the Foreigner, an assassin who has the ability to put his foes in a trance for a short period of time. What he does with this small sliver of power is amazing in the comics, and I feel they did a bit of justice in the big-screen portrayal of the character.
From a lion to a cat—the hunter and the hunted
Kraven the Hunter sets out to roar like a lion, but it occasionally purrs like a cat. Some newly inserted scenes stand out, jarring the flow with over-explaining moments of exposition and hurried editing to fit in a two-hour mark. If you ask me, the true villain of this movie, and the Sony Spider-verse, in general, is well evident here—corporate America and their interference in movie making.
Why I say this again and again is because the Sony movies, of late, in the Spider-verse were solid in script and cast—the last of the Venom trilogy, Morbius, and, dare I say, even Madame Web—yet when they hit the theatres in most parts of the world, they bombed.
The first and foremost reason could be the studio interference: certain newly inserted scenes, hurried cuts, and the lazy VFX in them, make you want to unleash the Kraven onto whoever is in charge at Sony for post-production.
The second, and the weirdly brow-raising reason, is that it almost feels like Sony does not want its movies to succeed worldwide. We were promised a gory, action-packed movie in the first trailer, and then it seemed like the marketing department fell off that train a month before the release. Barely any news or market buzz in big markets like India (I pointed this out during the Venom 3 release), delaying its release, and not even promoting it like a normal movie kind of sealed the deal. It is almost like how Russell Crowe’s Nikolai Kravinoff treats his sons in the movie.
I sincerely hope Sony learns something from this entire mess, for independently, it is a decent film. And I, for one, am batting for a sequel to Kraven the Hunter, even when I know the chances of that are close to now.
Film: Kraven the Hunter
Director: J.C. Chandor
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Russell Crowe
Rating: 2.5/5 | ★★✦☆☆
