Kraven the Hunter (Theatrical) 2024

My first encounter with Kraven the Hunter was in an episode of Spiderman And His Amazing Friends which I had on an old video tape from my great grandfather, along side many other old cartoons. In that episode he was a boisterous boastful bruiser of a man wearing a lion vest who commanded dinosaurs and wanted Firestar to help hatch his dinosaur eggs (it makes sense in context trust me). Kraven The Hunter in this movie is quite unlike that. 

Aaron Taylor Johnson plays Kraven as a hunter of bad people. He is a vigilante/assassin taking out the most powerful crime bosses around the world with enhanced strength and reflexes that were somehow granted to him through a magic potion and lion’s blood when he was fatally wounded during a hunting accident when he was young. Why does he do this? It is never clear. He says he does because the people he hunts “bring bad things into the world” 

 As stories go, this one is really shallow which is a pity because it feels like it has a lot of potential to go deeper. You never get much insight into Kraven’s motivations. One moment it is something about his crime boss father and his estranged younger brother left behind when Kraven ran away from home, the next it’s seemingly his own personal vendetta with no relation to his familial history. 

So Kraven hates his father, but loves his brother yet when it comes to his choosing one over the other, his vendetta against the various crime bosses of which his father is the biggest, or the safety of his brother by letting his father live, there is…nothing. No sense of conflict no deeper exploration of this dissonance. 

 Story issues aside I feel the action is at least a strong suit. Kraven’s various fights are intense and brutal stuff and it was a thrill watching him stalk, hunt and fight like different predatory beasts against armed militias, a deadly hitman with…hypnotic eyes? and a rhinoceros man? 

 In terms of overall tone, I feel the movie could not decide if it wanted to go full on comic booky or be a gritty realistic thriller. On one hand, everything is pretty grounded in reality sans Kraven’s powers which initially are left vague as to whether they are superhuman or just the result of skill and training. 

Like one character bears the name of a voodoo sorceress from comics but here she is a lawyer who “works her magic” through the legal system and gets roped into helping Kraven. But then you suddenly get literally magic, generic experimentation that grants people animal-like abilities, and full on psychic powers. 

 This weird duality is also seen in the visuals of the movie where the visual effects involving computer generated animals and characters like the aforementioned Rhino do not mesh well with the real actors and real locations.

 I find Kraven the Hunter to be an adequate action movie. It is straightforward, violent, and often thrilling with the action going into many different locales. It is also unfortunately unremarkable. 

While Aaron Taylor Johnson turns in a great performance as the titular character, there really isn’t much else that stands out in this movie right down to the generic soundtrack. This is definitely a movie that I would be most comfortable catching on streaming but not paying top dollar to see in cinema.