Kraven the Hunter feels like a movie that was never meant to be seen. That seems paradoxical considering the efforts of many talented people over years took place to bring the Spider-Man villain solo movie to some form of creaking, wheezing life. Since 2017, Sony has decided to create their own Spider-Man universes minus, of course, Spider-Man. They’ve been making solo movies about Spider-Man villains and while the Venom movies have been inexplicably popular, the rest have been regarded as unmitigated disasters. In 2022, Morbius was bad enough that Sony thought they could re-release it to capitalize on the memes and derisive entertainment factor. To no avail and a total lack of morbin’ time. In 2024, Sony released three Spider-Man villain movies, though Madame Web was never really a villain per se, but then again nobody really wanted a Madame Web movie anyhow, though it once again gave us some memorable memes. Now Kraven is reportedly closing out this shared cinematic universe experiment, and the president of Sony is blaming those mean ole film critics for the failures of these would-be superhero classics (always a smart movie, assuming audiences are incapable of making up their own minds). Delayed almost two years from its original January 2023 release date, Kraven the Hunter is the death knell of this enterprise and it comes to a thoroughly mediocre conclusion, feeling even more disposable, poorly developed, and mechanical, and ultimately a footnote to a footnote of superhero cinema.

Kraven, nee Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, portraying his third superhero) is the son of a notorious Russian crime boss, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). One day on a hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei rescues his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) from a lion. The lion injures Sergei and takes him for food, but thanks to a magic elixir from a tourist, Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who saves him. Now he has animal-like senses and speed and strength. As an adult, Kraven seeks out villains to bring to justice, but he’s also trying to square the legacy of his father and whether he is like dad.

The problem with these Spider-Man-Minus-Spider-Man movies is making people get interested in the famous web-slinger’s rogues gallery. This usually means treating the character’s best known for trading punches with another hero as their own individual anti-hero, complete with a more villainous villain for our future villains to have to topple. Usually these villains (the actual individual movie antagonists, not the protagonists) are an imitation of our heroes (still referencing the future villains), the mirror version of them. So if your protagonist is going to be a vampire, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil vampire. If your protagonist is an alien goo monster who likes to eat heads, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil alien goo monster that likes to eat heads. You get the idea. However, you digest enough of these, and it all seems a bit too perfunctory, the main character having to defeat a version of themself. The main challenge is finding a way to make an audience care about these characters, and having them rescue a love interest or defeat a new-but-same villain with the implicit promise that maybe, if you’re patient enough, you might see them eventually try to murder Spider-Man, is not it. I’m not against the idea of giving these villains their origin tales, but it feels like in order to make them more palatable to a mass audience means they’re neutering the nature of these characters. The hypothetical future Sinister Six movie can’t all be six misunderstandings against Spider-Man.

Alas, Kraven is a real bore of an action movie even with its R-rating, the first for these Spider-Man villain movies. The added bloodshed and curse words don’t exactly make the movie feel more adult when we’re still dealing with plotlines like a super lion biting our hero and giving him super lion powers, much like the origin story of Spider-Man, or another villain suffering from a very silly and similar Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goblin-itus medical malady. This is not a serious movie in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it can’t be passably fun, but everyone is just so dour and passionless that it drains all entertainment. At least Madame Web was perplexingly interesting with its bad decisions. There’s such little energy to be had through the middling two hours. Kraven is gifted superhuman powers and he uses them to hunt down bad men and big game poachers, becoming let’s say Captain Planet if he watched nothing but Charles Bronson movies. There’s got to be an exciting movie there, or at least a more interesting one than what we eventually got here. It’s hijacked by some pretty rote family drama of a bad dad who was too hard on his kids and rescuing a kidnapped little brother who he feels guilty about leaving with the bad dad after Kraven got his new powers. The family drama is pretty rote and uninspired, with both of the other characters kept to the sidelines for most of the movie, which makes it hard to care that much about either of their impacts. The haphazard integration of a romantic subplot with Calypso is even more perfunctory when I would much rather see Kraven fall in love with a lion instead.

I like J.C. Chandor as a director, and he’s someone who leaps at new challenges. His debut movie, 2011’s Margin Call, was an engrossing character piece about Wall Street traders and execs on the verge of the 2008 financial meltdown. It was so bare-bones that it was practically a play. His next film, 2013’s All is Lost, was the exact opposite: a movie completely told through visual storytelling and with a minimum of spoken words as Robert Redford tries to patch up his sinking boat. 2014’s A Most Violent Year was a slow-burn crime drama about the lengths people will go to escape their past and their nature. From there, Chandor has been circling larger studio projects, leaving 2016’s Deepwater Horizon and then replacing Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix’s action thriller, 2019 Triple Frontier. He’s a chameleon of a director and the only real point of interest I had with Kraven. What would he do in the superhero space? Well, the answer is not much. The visual flourishes we’ve seen before in other movies but without a sense of humor. Watching Kraven periodically run on all fours may make him more animal-like but it doesn’t look good. The movie gets lost in the convoluted mythology and rules of its characters and what they’re capable of, and so the action sequences feel cobbled together and short on imagination. The climax is during a stampede of buffalo but there’s no real danger here like dodging around the animals. They very conveniently allow space for our hero to fight his battle, thus becoming a thundering backdrop. Even if you’re overly generous, there’s not much here to excite the senses or even your morbid curiosity.

There is one line of dialogue that needs to be singled out for its absurdity. While Madame Web was ridiculed for its “researching spiders in the Amazon with my mother before she died” line, the filmmakers had the good sense to eliminate it from the final film, though not the good sense not to include it in their initial marketing. With Kraven the Hunter, there’s a character who talks about her mother and literally says, “She died and I never saw her again.” That’s usually how that works.

As the final piece of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff universe, Kraven the Hunter brings this diversionary superhero franchise to a merciful end. The frustrating thing is that Kraven as a character can work, as recently demonstrated in the popular Spider-Man PlayStation video game sequel. He’s supposed to be the ultimate hunter, a force of nature, but that doesn’t mean he needs to carry his own movie, just like Morbius or Madame Web or any other Spidey villain. Launching these characters could have worked but needed much more imagination and care. Instead, it was Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man and, with the exception of the Venom movies with their goofy buddy movie appeal, audiences have responded with the indifference you would assume. It’s not enough for these movies to merely be adjacent to Spider-Man to be appealing. They need to be good, to be able to stand on their own, and to support an extended time with this character. It’s hard not to see the larger machinations for eager franchise-extension as the primary motivation. But if these are the impressions of the characters we’re getting, who would want any more? Turns out nobody was actively cravin’ another underdeveloped and mediocre superhero movie.

Nate’s Grade: C-