KRAVEN THE HUNTER (2024)

From Sony Pictures comes another superhero camp comedy that screeches like a Siberian husky’s asthmatic, wolf-wannabe howl, and thunders like an old fart the Sony executives have been holding back in their intestines, accumulating and fermenting, to be flatulated in majestic proportions. Kraven the Hunter is a kind of unintentional parody of Zack Snyder and Andrew Tate, and I choked on my popcorn laughing at it. It’s about Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the son of a fat-arsed billionaire Russell Crowe doppelgänger—conjuring up the thickest James-Bond-villain Russian accent he could without sounding like Slavoj Žižek—who becomes a hot, shirtless, 12-pack SJW Tarzan gigachad after his blood’s mixed with that of a dead lion. Which, as everybody knows from elementary school biology class, makes him a mutant with random cat powers.

It’s just when I was ready to settle for My Old Ass (2024) as the best comedy this year that I was delighted to see Taylor-Johnson broken on the wheel of his own star vehicle. He keeps a frown on his face as if he’s repressing something within him from leaking out. Maybe it’s something in his bladder. My man’s approach to acting here amounts to the motto: “I pose, therefore I am.” For over two-hours, he looks like he’s there for a Men’s Health photoshoot, and his brooding face has an effect opposite to the intended one of creating intensity: you’ll find yourself wanting to groom him like a sad-faced Shiba.

We open with a scene where Kraven’s given the chance to take a leak before making it to prison. He doesn’t, of course, take it. He turns around, looks back at the camera, vaguely angry, as if to say “Real men don’t take piss.” He’s a vigilante on a mission to tick off someone (Yuri Kolokolnikov) inside that prison. What’s he fighting for? Animal rights. Why does he fight? That’s for us to know and him to find out. It’s besides the point to lay out the plot for you, telling you why Kraven’s angel-face brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) was kidnapped, or what Kraven’s powers are and how he got them. It’s the one thing that can drive your friends away from it.

You never would have believed this is the work of director J.C. Chandor, who was behind Margin Call (2011), All is Lost (2013), and A Most Violent Year (2014). My 2¢’s tell me that he gave no thought to the thing, and as soon as he’d finished shooting he left it for the studio men. Many tell me their interpretation of Megalopolis (2024) is camp and that many of its defects may or may not be intentional. But Kraven is truly funny the way Megalopolis largely wasn’t, because it hasn’t the faintest awareness of itself or the audience (its only true competitor this month is The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which has a grief-stricken king that turns into a monstrous bodybuilder overnight).

How do you have a nerd supervillain (Alessandro Nivola) who always wears a backpack and plays passive-aggressive with his pet dog? How do you have Christopher Abbott moving in and out of existence with the menace of a laconic, incel-coded anime supervillain? How do you have Kraven tearing half a city apart chasing down a van barefoot? Everything is so speechlessly goofy all one can do is sit back and curl up chortling. It’s futile explaining any of the incidental visual gags, but I just want to say that when the screen shifted to the dead lion’s head on the wall, I lost it. Those with asphyxiation beware: it’s not a movie you want to die laughing at.

The downside of looking stupid when one merely wants to look straight, is that the unintentionality can also lend to dullness and tedium. Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) plays some kind of a voodoo lawyer who resurrected Kraven with random magic potion, and she’s virtually indistinguishable from an A.I. generation, which is weird for an Academy Award-winner; it’s a good laughing stock performance. Here are some of the lines she was given: “Three of my sources have gone offline. I don’t like the feel of this at all.” / “You’re not the only one with secrets.” / And the next one takes the prize: “I didn’t want you to murder. I’m a lawyer.” 

John Huston’s conscious approach to Beat the Devil (1953)—originally a Maltese Falcon (1941) copycat—can’t be easily mimicked without looking studied and calibrated, which takes the air out, but an accidental Mommie Dearest (1981) can be just as much fun. Kraven has its sluggish parts that can act like melatonin and put you to sleep, but insanely absurd things keep on happening that it’s easy to pick up where you left off while it’s still hot: Kraven prison breaks into a snowstorm and scares off a wolf on the way with his penetrating gaze and handsome face; Kraven chases a helicopter in the river while being tied to it, and his head hits something that sounded like metal… moments later, he emerges in one piece; Kraven came running in the woods for no apparent reason, chased off a bunch of deer for no apparent reason, and stopped a cow in a random stampede for no apparent reason; Kraven bites off somebody’s nose in an action scene…

It’s honestly a shame that Sony’s ‘Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man’ franchise is coming to a close. Casual moviegoers today have little interest in the kind of B-movies that echoed titles like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) or Orgy of the Dead (1965), and the studios have no idea how to advertise, let alone make, such a droll affair when they see one, if they see one. Is it not a gift to humanity that all these movies have failed so gloriously? What mediocre bores could we have gotten instead in another universe (like the ones we’ve been getting from Disney ever since Thanos turned to dust)?

In the closing scene, Kraven wears a gift coat from his dad (you’d never guess what had happened to him), and sits down “gracefully” to admire the view in the mirror. You can’t even cringe: it sets the standard so low you can’t feel embarrassed for it. You’re so overwhelmed with utter disbelief there’s no room left to cringe anyway. You know what they say, though: rest in piss, you won’t be missed.

USA • ICELAND • CANADA • UK | 2024 | 127 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: J.C Chandor.
writers: Richard Wenk, Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (story by Richard Wenk).
starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott & Russell Crowe.