Movie Review: 'Kraven the Hunter' More Like 'Kraven the Disaster'

Kraven the Hunter

Directed by J.C Chandor

Written by RIchard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway

Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe

Released December 13th, 2024

Published December 13th, 2024

Kraven the Hunter has me wondering if Hollywood has somehow discovered a Mel Brooks-The Producers style scheme where a flop can actually be a moneymaker. I don’t know how that would work in the film space but it’s the only way I can conceive of how movie studios can release movies as bad as Kraven the Hunter, movies that are almost guaranteed to lose money, and simply move on to the next movie without everyone involved losing their jobs. And when you consider that this is the studio behind Madame Web and Morbius, suddenly my theory becomes at least a little bit plausible.

Kraven the Hunter is a bafflingly silly proposition. A kid named Sergey, the son of a famed gangster played by Russell Crowe, is mauled by a lion while on a safari vacation in Africa and is rescued by a mysterious potion that, mixed with the lion’s own blood, gives Sergey super-human strength, speed, agility, and instincts. The potion is a gift from a stranger named Calypso, whose grandmother, and I truly cringe to write this, is a voodoo priestess. Best not to unpack that.

Anyway, after spending way too long on the backstory, we get to what passes as a plot. A grown up Sergey (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is now secretly the mysterious killer known as ‘The Hunter’ or ‘Kraven The Hunter’ or just ‘Kraven.’ But most people just call him Sergey. Why Kraven? Who the hell knows. The comic book probably explains it but the movie doesn’t bother. Sergey’s thing is killing poachers in the Russian wild though he’s not very good at it. In fact, he waits until an entire herd of animals are slaughtered and has their horns cut off before he intervenes and all so he can make a nonchalant cool-guy entrance into the scene before he slaughters the baddies.

The trail of the poachers brings Sergey/Kraven to London where he connects with Calypso (Ariana DeBose) and he abandons searching for poachers so he can take on the gangsters who killed a friend of Calypso. By the way, this is the first time he’s met Calypso since her grandmother’s potion saved his life. Conveniently, Sergey’s brother and father also live in London so he can get them in on the story. Sergey abandoned his brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, everyone’s favorite lip quivering creep), when he left to become a hunter back in Russia. Little bro doesn’t appear to hold a grudge until the end of the movie but who cares.

Russell Crowe is the only entertaining aspect of Kraven the Hunter. The easy star charisma oozing from Crowe dwarfs the rest of the cast and his absence is felt when he’s not on screen. Nothing against Aaron Taylor Johnson, his 22 abs are really impressive, but the movie takes his silly character so seriously that it makes him look ridiculous. He’s not having any fun doing this and we’re not having any fun watching him. Well, perhaps lovers of a body sculpted to a ludicrously muscular fashion may enjoy his random shirtlessness.

The plot shifts one more time from who killed Calypso’s friend to who kidnapped Sergey’s brother and it’s not a very interesting answer. Alessandro Nivola gives an embarrassing performance as the villainess Rhino who can turn into a Rhino, I guess. Well, an ugly Rhino/Human hybrid that’s about as imaginative as anything A.I could have created. Then again, the whole of Kraven the Hunter could likely have been an A.I prompt come to life and it’d be about the same as what we get in this movie supposedly made by human beings.

The most baffling element of Kraven the Hunter, for me, is the direction. J.C Chandor is a good director. I have evidence of him being a good director. He made All is Lost with Robert Redford and A Most Violent Year with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. Those are really great movies. How did he forget how to direct a movie? Did having more money than he could possibly need trip him up? Perhaps it’s the special effects he’s not used to. His talent is for complicated characters in very human peril. Perhaps he doesn’t get how CGI is supposed to work. The CGI he oversaw for Kraven the Hunter is gooey, goofy looking, and not the least bit convincing.

It’s truly shocking how awful Kraven the Hunter is. Where did they spend $130 million dollars? Was Russell Crowe super-expensive? I don’t see the money on the screen as the CGI looks like it was crafted with the least effort and expense possible. So where did the money go? My guess is the money resides in the pockets of the producers and the studio who have managed to invent some remarkable loophole that allows them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on poor quality projects doomed to lose tens of millions of dollars and still come away with… something.

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