A young man is imprisoned in a high security Russian jail, but that was part of the plan. The young man is really a master assassin who takes down a Russian crime lord. the assassin then makes a daring and brazen escape, with the guards too late realizing that the prisoner was really Sergei Kravinoff, who has taken the nom de guerre of Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
We then go back sixteen years where young Sergei and his brother Dmitri are spirited away by his father, crime lord Nikolai (Russell Crowe). In his view, the best way for his boys to handle the offscreen suicide of their mother is by going hunting to Ghana. There, Sergei is almost killed when he hesitates and is taken by a lion. Fortunately, a young woman whose grandmother is into voodoo is around to provide a magical potion to save his life. Moving back into the present day, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is the owner and star of his own London club, where he is perfectly able to sound exactly like everyone from Harry Styles to Tony Bennett. Nikolai is still disappointed in Dmitri and Sergei is a stranger to him.
Sergei for his part has become an animal rights vigilante, going after poachers. This brings him into conflict with Aleksei Sytsevich, also known as The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), who abducts Dmitri as insurance against Nikolai. Kraven, who loves his brother and unlike Nikolai is not willing to see him killed, turns once again to the voodoo queen who saved him, American lawyer Calypso (Ariana DeBose). She is somewhat helpful, but it is now up to Kraven to fight against Rhino and save Dmitri. This is complicated by Rhino's master assassin, a shadowy figure known as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott). He is able to move fast enough to not make his targets aware of where he is, giving him the chance to kill them unaware. Will Kraven the Hunter be able to defeat his newest foes? Will Dmitri prove himself or prove that he is a future great danger? Will Calypso find powers outside those from her friends on the other side?
I do not think we need worry about the rise of Dmitri as the future villain Chameleon. Kraven the Hunter seems to have gone almost out of its way to ensure that no one will care. It is to where at one point I was getting Dmitri and Sergei mixed up, so bland the characters were. Everyone in Kraven the Hunter was bland, both in their characters and in their performances. You forget that the film has two Academy Award winners in its cast, yet watching Russell Crowe and Ariana DeBose here, one wonders how they have managed to put themselves in this willingly.
My guess is that director J.C. Chandor did not look on Kraven the Hunter as a passion project because no one had any passion. As stated, everyone looked bored and oddly disengaged from things. DeBose looks downright bored with things. Calypso was a nothing character: not interesting, not exciting, serving no purpose other than to bring about Kraven's rescue on two occasions. Hechinger, I think, was trying to make Dmitri a tragic figure, but he had little to work with. Overall, there was nothing in any performance that suggested those in front of the camera genuinely cared if Kraven the Hunter was good.
Perhaps I can walk that back a bit when it comes to Crowe. He seemed to want to camp it up with his faux-Russian accent but couldn't quite commit to being deliberately over-the-top. It soon becomes The Battle of the Bad Accents in Kraven the Hunter. I at least knew that Crowe's Nikolai was meant to be Russian. Try as I might, I was not sure what Nivola was supposed to be. That also goes for Abbott's The Foreigner, whose nom de guerre would probably elicit chuckles more than gasps. I cannot say that his charcter was ill-defined. I don't think he was defined at all.
When I look at Taylor-Johnson (separate from his buff body), I see someone who I think might have been sincere in an effort to make Kraven the Hunter if not good at least serviceable. It is, I think, unfair to place blame on him for how bad Kraven the Hunter is. He had a great opening in the film, the prison escape being a highlight and strong way to start. It is once we go to a flashback that I think is around forty minutes long that Kraven the Hunter starts coming undone. The flashback is too long, gives us a very silly way to have the characters interact and stops the momentum cold. Once we go back to the present day, the film builds up almost a sluggishness to it all.
The visual effects were at times almost shockingly bad. What is meant as a climactic moment where Rhino reveals his true self and fights both Kraven and a buffalo stampede looks dull and terribly fake. The same with Kraven's attempted rescue of Dmitri. The score too attempts to build up what is meant to be one filled with tension and excitement. It could not.
Is Kraven the Hunter one of the worst films of 2024? I think not, for there are many films that are worse and which I would choose Kraven the Hunter to see again. That does not mean that I would want to watch Kraven the Hunter again. It is, however, a final end to any hopes of any hoped-for franchise. No one will be craving more Kraven.
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