Kraven the Hunter

This is not a good movie.

Kraven the Hunter

Sony Studios’ latest attempt to capitalize on their live-action Spider-Man film rights manages to limp across the finish line and collapse, telling the story of the man known as Kraven, who becomes a feared hunter of both man and beast, after his relationship with his father sours.

Along with Venom, Morbius, and Madame Web, Kraven The Hunter is not just the latest, it’s also the final, entry in yet another studios’ failed attempt to replicate the success of the MCU. Sony Studios' failure would probably be one of the worst and most baffling of examples too, if it weren't for the immense failure that was The Dark Universe. Y'see, ever since the MCU became a big hit, Sony has been desperately clinging to its Spider-man film rights like Rose to her floating door. But due to their weird refusal to ever use Spider-man in live action, whether it was Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, Jessica Drew, or even Miquel O’Hara, in the end, due to the continued success of the MCU, there was just no room for Sony on that floating door, so like poor Jack, unable to hold on any longer, they have now slipped beneath the waves.

This whole situation is so weird.

Sure, I get it… you want to save Tom Holland’s Peter Parker for the really big things, okay fine. That seems weirdly arbitrary, and has no upside that I can see, and I also don’t see a downside with making these villain-centered films, and then having Spider-man show up at the end and beat them up, but whatever… no one asked me. But still, there’s so many different spider-people available, if you don't want to use Peter Parker, why not use one of the other spider-people instead? Why not use all of them? Why not give each one of them their own movie? Why not just develop them all simultaneously? Or maybe team some of them up? Instead of focusing on the sisyphean task of making these second-rate villains into stars, why not have them be the foils to a handful of different spider-heroes, and then bring them all together for a big brouhaha, kinda like Marvel did with the Avengers…?

But again… whatever. No one asked me.

So yeah, instead of using the cream that had long ago risen to the top, Sony decided to start with the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel first. Continuing to utilize the worst ideas, they dubbed this new cinematic universe the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters or SPUMC. When they were asked why they didn’t just call it the Spider-Verse, Sony hemmed and hawed and exchanged panicked glances before dashing out a side door, and then later announced that it was actually called Sony's Spider-Man Universe or SSU.

And worst of all, throughout all of this mismanaged nonsense, Sony Studios was also doing a generally shitty job of executing the films that made up this incredibly bad idea. Venom. Morbius. Madame Web. They made six or seven of these subpar, vaguely-linked films that are generally disliked both by critics and audiences alike, and in the end, surprise, surprise, it was unsustainable. Finally, to the surprise of no one, except for maybe the Sony executives who shouldn’t have had those jobs in the first place—like the coincidentally fired around the same time, former CEO of Sony Pictures, Tony Vinciquerra—the whole venture failed.

Now it’s all done.

This means Sony poured money into, and have now abandoned, not only the Sinisiter Six movie they were clearly so excited for (which would’ve seen six spider-villains team up, and isn’t a totally bad idea), but also into a long list of some of the weirdest and most random character choices from Spider-man’s list of supporting characters you could imagine. Some are so obscure, even I had to look them up.

The list includes a film about the flash-in-the-pan, there-and-forgotten 90s era superhero, Nightwatch, a film that Spike Lee was supposedly interested in, but I just flat out do not believe that shit. There was also supposedly a Jackpot film in development too. It presumably would've focused on the 3rd and current Jackpot, which is Peter Parker’s wife, supermodel Mary Jane Watson, using this “random power generating” bracelet to fight crime. There was also a spider-related project by Robert Orci in the works, one that presumably would’ve involved 9/11 somehow being an inside job, as well as a potential Spider-woman film slated to be directed by Olivia Wilde, although its unclear which Spider-woman it would’ve focused on, and for a long time, in addition to those ideas, Sony was making a big deal out of the frankly inexplicable idea of having the rapper Bad Bunny star as El Muerto, a luchador-based sort-of-villain misfire who‘s had maybe two appearances total in comics. There was also supposedly a Donald Glover film about the Hypno-Hustler, a guy who can hypnotize people with his guitar, and when teamed with his backup band, The Mercy Killers, can perform mass hypnosis, and also his boots can emit knockout gas on demand, which feels like a stinky feet joke maybe, and his boots also have retractable knives in the soles, which feels like a concession to the one guy in the room, when they were designing the character, who really wanted to design an entirely different kind of character.

"But what if he had claws like Wolverine?"
"Okay, fine, Bob! God damn... We'll put knives in his boots."

There were also supposedly multiple different tv series in the works too. Maybe one about Aunt May. Maybe one about Cindy Moon, the spider-hero known as Silk. There may have even been a team-up of Silver Sable and Black Cat as well, which could've been a cool super-crooks type of thing. But for the most part, it’s a dumbfounding list of some of the most random d-tier and forgotten characters imaginable, characters that depend on Spider-man to exist. It’s like the Sony Executives were drunk and picking names out of a hat.

And so, here we are with Kraven the Hunter, the lame duck of an already-dead franchise, doomed to be a complete failure before it ever even hit the silver screen, the last gasp of an endeavor with no future. It’s true it never had a real chance, but it’s not because the press turned audiences against this franchise with their snark, it’s because it was all terrible ideas, born from a… web… (Eh? Eh? See what I did there?) of terrible ideas, all of which were then terribly executed. This fact makes Kraven a different situation from the Mega-franchise Killer, The Mummy, which was so terrible it brought down an entire monolith of studio money, PR, and pure celebrity star power before it could even truly get started. No, Kraven is more like the cinematic version of the Last Son of Krypton, a tiny Kal-El rocketing away from a doomed planet to finally crash-land on earth, but instead of baby Superman, this rocket is carrying a baby Pooperman away from fiery conflagration of ill-conceived ideas to finally crash-land in the Box Office. It’s not one thing that killed SPUMC, it’s everything. It’s every idea. Every thought. Every choice. Every step. So, even if Kraven is bad, and it is, it is largely innocent in the destruction of Sony's plans. So, I was honestly kind of curious to see this orphaned child of a dead universe, this left-over vestige of a cobwebbed effort. What wonders will it show me?

Turns out, just one... that it’s a wonder this film was even made.

The Characters


Kraven

Kraven the Hunter was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #15 in 1964.

As his real name is Sergei Nikolaevich Kravinoff, he chose to be known as Kraven, because it’s a shortened version of Kravinoff. And if I was trying to win a legendary Marvel No-Prize–something I still covet to this day–I'd guess that he simply had no idea that the word “craven” means someone who is “contemptibly lacking in courage; cowardly” probably because English is his second language, and that the later discovery of this maybe also explains why he’s such a pompous butthole too.

A sort of “most dangerous game” big game hunter type of character, Kraven lives by a code, often choosing to hunt his game fairly, in order to say he truly bested them. In the comics, he's the son of Russian aristocrat Nikolai Kravinoff, who fled to the United States with his family during the February Revolution and collapse of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. 1917, you say? Yes, because time has no real meaning in comics, Kraven is super old. Also, I believe he's currently dead, so it's a moot point. Either way, the reason why he is so old is due to the usual reasons... he consumed a mystical serum that not only gave him enhanced strength, speed, and durability, it also dramatically slowed his aging.

His half-brother is the supervillain known as The Chameleon, he's a founding member of the Sinister Six, and a former lover of the voodoo priestess supervillain, Calypso, and his whole deal is that he wants to defeat Spider-man, and thus prove to the world that he is the greatest hunter to ever live. Why he conflated those two things, I have no idea.


Calypso

Created by Denny O'Neil and Alan Weiss, and first appearing in Amazing Spider-Man #209 in 1980), Calypso is a Haitian voodoo priestess, and the occasional lover and partner of Kraven the Hunter. She is occasionally known as The Witch and the The Hunter of Souls.

Known for cheating death multiple times, in the comics, she’s a “malignant spirit” type of character, and often ensorcells people, drives them mad, and then makes them commit violence. She likes to use her voodoo magic to resurrect zombies too, and then use them to just generally ruin other people’s days. Maybe as a assassins, maybe as bank robbers, maybe just to hold her place in line, despite there being a "no cuts" rule. I assume her top is held on by some kind of magic too.

In the film, she’s not a villain, or Haitian, and she does not do voodoo or ressurrect the dead, she is Ghanese, and she’s also a good guy, and she has some vague family “animal spirit” potion making magic/skills. She also wears more regular shirts.


Rhino

Created by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr., and first appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man#41 in 1966, Aleksei Sytsevich was big goon in the Russian mafia who volunteered for an experimental procedure to bond a super-strong polymer to his skin, which then somehow grants him superhuman strength, speed, and durability. I assume this also somehow made him bigger too, because he’s gigantic. That said, because I’ve never actually read Rhino’s origin, I don’t know if this experimental polymer was intended to look like a rhinoceros, or if after the bonding was over, Alexei looked at himself in the mirror and went… “Y’know what? I’m adding a couple of rhino horns.”

A thug-for-hire type of supervillain, Rhino is typically portrayed as a dimwitted and easily tricked brute, but one who is capable of great destruction. His incredible speed allows him to run at high velocities over short distances, which means that he often charges his opponents, despite his lack of agility and slow reaction time, which makes it difficult for him to change direction. This means that Spider-man will often leap onto Rhino’s back, web over his eyes and then run him straight into a building or something, so he'll knock himself out.

He's basically the same in the movie as he is in the comics, big and stupid, except that he's more "stupid" because the movie is generally stupid, not because the character is written as a stupid person.


Chameleon

Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Dmitri Smerdyakov first appeared in the debut issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in March 1963. He is not only the first supervillain to face Spider-Man, he is also the first member of Spider-man’s Rogue Gallery, except for the burglar who killed Uncle Ben, of course.

The half-brother of Kraven the Hunter, a man who he loves, fears, and hates, the Chameleon is a master of disguise. Originally, he didn’t have superpowers, and simply used a collection of lifelike masks, a devotion to the Stanislavsky method of acting, a repertoire of expert celebrity impressions, and a belt buckle stuffed with holographic technology. Eventually, he had his genetic makeup altered, as you do in comic books, which allowed him to be able to shift his appearance at will. Not interested in the fame and fortune of Hollywood, he uses his abilities to be a spy, a hitman, and a criminal mastermind, which allows him no end of opportunities to pull his mask off in a surprise reveal, just like in the beloved epic Scientology Spy Mission Impossible movies.

In the movie, Dmitri Kravinoff is portrayed Kraven’s estranged younger half-brother, who also has a talent for mimicking other's voices.


The Foreigner

Created by Peter David and Rich Buckler, and first appearing in Web of Spider-man #15 and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man #116 in the summer of 1986, The Foreigner was intended to look like actor Patrick McGoohan, otherwise known as Danger Man, John Drake, and Number Six in the tv show Prisoner, which even for the 80s feels like an incredibly out-of-date reference.

The Foreigner is a legendary mercenary and assassin. He has no superhuman abilities, but he has trained his body to be in absolute peak physical condition, and is considered to be one of the greatest martial artists in the Marvel Universe. The Foreigner also possesses a seemingly mystical ability to hypnotize with eye contact, placing his opponents in a 10 second trance, making it appear to his opponents like he can move with super speed.

He's basically the same in both the comics and the movie, just your typically boring cookie-cutter "bad ass" character.


Miles Warren, The Jackal

Originally created by Stan Lee and Steve Dikto, and also Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, Miles Warren was originally introduced in The Amazing Spider-man #31 in December of 1965, but The Jackal wasn’t actually introduced until nearly ten years later in The Amazing Spider-Man #129 in February of 1974.

Miles Warren was an assistant of The High Evolutionary at Wundagore Mountain after earning his Ph.D. in biochemistry. There, he would assist the High Evolutionary in experiments that involved turning animals into humans and vice versa, because that's basically all that ever happens on Wundagore Mountain, before he moved on and became a professor at the premier college of the Marvel Universe, Empire State University. This is where Peter Parker and his then still alive girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, attended. While there, professor Warren developed a creepy crush on Gwen, who was basically a teenage girl at the time. After Gwen’s death at the hands of the Green Goblin, and also probably due to a midlife crisis, Professor Warren went nuts, trained himself in martial arts, and put together a furry green bodysuit with yellow underwear and razor-tipped gauntlets, called himself The Jackal, and vowed to take revenge on Spider-man for reasons that make no sense, but… y’know… comics. You might think this whole origin story sounds weird and half-assed, but this is like a Tuesday in the Marvel Universe. Anyway, while The Jackal initially didn't possess any superpowers, he later did the thing, and got some genetic modifications, combining his own genes with that of an actual jackal, which resulted in him gaining super strength, speed, and agility, because again… comics.

The Jackal is a weird hodge-pudge of a villain that has never seemed to have a coherent theme, especially once he added his “mastery” of the art of cloning to his repertoire. And as a result, he's one of Spider-Man's least popular villains, mostly because 30 years he was the main villain in the infamous Spider Clone Saga story line, which was apparently the worst thing to ever happen to fans of Spider-man comics. But me personally, I love him. The Jackal is a huge weirdo. And I love when these movies use these classic oddballs.

Unfortunately, he never actually appears in this film.

In the movie, he’s just a mysterious doctor in New York who is briefly mentioned by both Aleksei Systevich and Dmitri Smerdyakov as being responsible for their powers as The Rhino and The Chameleon respectively. He’s mostly an Easter Egg for fans, and a future seed for plot lines that will now never grow.

Alas, Babylon.


The Movie

Following the death of his mother, Sergei Kravinoff and his half-brother Dmitri are taken in by their father, Nikolai Kravinoff. A dangerous Russian mobster, Nikolai isn’t a great father to the boys. He’s a “stop crying, poor some vodka on that bullet wound, and walk it off,” kind of dad, and unfortunately for their family unit, Sergei is an angry teen, and Dmitri is a sensitive teen, so things don't work out.

During a “get tough” family hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei is gravely injured protecting Dmitri from a lion. The lion and Sergai have a moment, so the Lion decides not to eat him and instead brings him to a young girl named Calypso. She heals Sergei using a strange serum. Sergei soon discovers that the strange serum has made him into a supreme ass-kicker. When his father reveals that he killed the lion in order to teach his sons a lesson about being tough, because apparently the fact that they survived a lion attack isn’t tough enough, I guess, Sergei runs away to the Russian woods, where his mother owned an animal sanctuary, and proceeds to angrily live in an old yurt.

Many years later, Sergei is now known as Kraven, a feared vigilante who hunts criminals. After a big splashy demonstration of what this entails, Kraven travels to London for Dmitri's birthday. Unfortunately a bunch of mercenaries abduct the birthday boy before they can even have cake. Their father Nikolai refuses to pay the ransom, probably because he believes Dmitri needs to toughen up, so Kraven tracks down Calypso, who is now a lawyer, and convinces her to help, although it’s unclear what he really needs from her, and also she doesn’t really do anything, except for… y’know… generally being a sexy lady who is present during many scenes.

"I'll just... wait here then?" says Calypso.

Meanwhile, Dmitri is taken to the man behind his kidnapping, Aleksei Sytsevich, who has the ability to turn into a rhinoceros man. There, Dmitri discovers that Aleksei actually wants Dmitri to help him take out Dmitri’s father, Nikolai.

Unfortunately, Kraven is a big problem for reasons, because he and Aleksei can’t be friends, and as a result, there’s a lot of running and punching, and then Aleksei sends The Foreigner after Kraven and Calypso, and there’s some more running and punching, which doesn’t go well for The Foreigner. Then Aleksei “Rhinos out” and he and Kraven fight in the middle of a stampede just like in The Lion King, and one of them has to be Simba, and one of them has to be Mufasa.

After that, the film thinks that we care about Kraven and his father Nikolai‘s relationship, so they wrap that up with a big bear hug, and then, one year later, Kraven finds out that Dmitri is now in charge of father's criminal empire, and also he has shapeshifting abilities. Kraven is upset at this for some reason, but Dmitri then gives him a vest made from the skin of the lion their father killed long ago, and Kraven is like… holy shit, this is snazzy as fuck, so he wears it.

Roll credits.


This is a bad movie. Every part of it.

The scene where the film very laboriously introduces basic concepts like tarot cards is a big expository red flag for the film’s general quality. It's a film that opens like a herd of turtles with this shockingly long orign sequence of Kraven as a boy, and there is no doubt that the movie would’ve been better off with none of it. Like so many of these desperate attempts to replicate the success of the MCU, this film clearly does not understand why the MCU was a success, so instead of embracing it fully, it tries keeping its comic book source material at arm’s length, save for a few winks and nods and allusions, and we all remember how generally bad an idea that was in the 90s. Also, much like a lot of the weird outliers in the scifi/fantasy genre pool, like Red One or the terrible Rebel Moon movies, Kraven is way too much lore, not enough character, and the action is terrible. Often times, it's nothing but a rip-off of scenes we’ve seen before, from Red Guardian escaping a Russian prison, to Rambo taking out a group of armed men in the forest one by one, etc., etc. And like the worst comic book adaptations from the 90s and early aughts, we only get to see Kraven in his iconic Lion mane vest for a brief moment at the very end.

It’s just a bad movie.

No wonder this Sony Spider-Man Universe failed.

There’s potentially a decent Blade-era 90s style hoodie-and-shadows superhero flick in here, but it’s bogged down by a clumsy tale of family dynamics that no one gives a fuck about. And that they take so long to explain a relatively simple concept like Kraven is extra crazy when you consider that in the very same movie, with The Rhino, the film just goes: “Oh, I’ve always had a weird skin condition, but it’s cool, unless… I stop taking my medication!” And then bam! Rhino time.

If the SPUMC wasn’t already dead, Kraven would’ve killed it.

The strangest part with all of these Spider-Man villain films that don’t feature Spider-Man at all, is how the fact that Spider-Man doesn’t appear, forces these films into making the bad guy main characters into good guys. This seems to ruin their entire plan of building up a bunch of villains for a Sinister Six film, who will then face Spider-man, because now each potential villain is a hero.

Whatever. Doesn't matter now. Is there a quote like "the best laid plans of mice and men..." but for really stupid plans? There should be.

This is a bad film. Bad and boring and dumb, its focus lost in too many rewrites and reshoots and dumb ideas and poor edits, and worse, because of that, it feels inept while you're watching it. Even if you expected it to be bad, I don’t think you prepared for it to be this bad. I honestly didn't think Sony could do worse than Madame Web, but they did.

Thumbs down.