Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has family issues. He is the favorite son of his crime lord father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe), who favors him over his half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger). But Nicolai thinks both of his boys (played by Levi Miller as Sergei and Billy Barratt as Dmitri in the past) need to be more manly, so he arranges a special hunting trip to Northern Ghana so they can hunt wild game. This turns disastrous when a lion mauls Sergei and carries him off into the brush. Luckily, Sergei is dropped near Calypso (Diaana Babnicova), a visiting American girl who has a magical elixir she got from her tarot-reading, Ghana-residing grandmother.
The potion not only saves Sergei’s life but also gives him the powers of most of wild animals in Africa. He runs away from his father and begins using these powers to fight evil, starting with the men who poach on his land and eventually moving up to international crime lords.
He eventually builds up his legend as the mysterious “Hunter” amongst the criminal underground, known for have a kill list of bad men where if you get on the list, the only way you get off it is when he kills you. One man who is on the list is Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a Russian crime lord with a beef with the Kravinoff family, who wants to track down and kill the Hunter before the Hunter kills him. But Sergei is hunting Sytsevich as well, with the help of a now adult, London-based lawyer Calypso (Ariana DeBose). The film becomes a race against time to see which killer finds the other first.
Before I start into the meat of the review, I’m going to say something I have said a number of times on this site: I have an affinity for cheesy action films. So, as long as the story has a badass and charismatic main character, exciting stunts and fights, and a creepy bad guy who gets it in the end, I will be predisposed to overlook any and all flaws and just go along with the ride.
In that aspect, Kraven the Hunter succeeds. Taylor-Johnson is great in the lead role. You get a Hugh Jackman feel off him in this role (which might be because Kraven is presented in the film as a savage, Quasi-animalistic Wolverine-lite). He is believable when delivering quips, he is believable in the emotional scenes, and he is great in the action scenes. He’s even great with showing the animal nature poking through, like when he runs upstairs like a leopard or heaves like a great cat as he tries to catch his breath.
And what great action scenes they are. The stunt design is amazing, especially in the chase scene after Dmitri is kidnapped. The fight choreography is also very good. The fights are where the film earns its R-Rating, as you’ll see more knifes going into heads than you have ever seen before. But the fights use Kraven’s powers to their best advantage–in other words, you’ll believe someone with Kraven’s powers would fight this way. J.C. Chandor directs action scenes that are clear and easy to understand, with a dollop of humor and suspense added when the scene calls for it.
The acting is good all the way through, which is to be expected with two Oscar winners in the cast. But I find that Nivola did a subtly excellent job as the main villain, Sytsevich. He makes the character creepy and sinister in the nerdiest way possible. I found it a unique take on your typical action movie bad guy.
However, who Nivola is really playing is the Rhino. And the changes made to the character from the comics illustrate the problem I had with the movie as a comic book fan. They changed so much from the comics that it can barely call itself a comic book adaptation. The Rhino in the comics is a dim-witted perennial lackey. He is in no way a mastermind. And Russell Crowe’s Nicolai is more like the comic book Kraven that Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven is, personality-wise.
And I know why they changed it. They wanted to make Kraven into an anti-hero audiences could root for. So changing him go after people who hunt animals than being a man who hunts animals is done so he could play better with modern audiences. They need a super-powered nemesis for Kraven to fight at the end of the film, so Rhino got changed from a henchman to head man. They changed so much from the comics that I thought halfway through the film that it might have been better if they didn’t try to connect it to the Spider-Man license. And they wouldn’t have to change much to make that happen.
Because after the liberties Sony took with the source material, then name dropping “Miles Warren” in the script is going to have the comic book nerds like me whooping in delight. And the non-comic fans won’t know the reference (For your information, Miles Warren was a professor of Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy who went crazy when Stacy died and became a villain named the Jackal, went crazy and cloned both of them. I could go on, but he is only mentioned twice in the film, and that should be enough to get you uninitiated up to speed with who he is.) And I hate to tell you, having Kraven show up in the final frame in a costume that looks almost, but not quite, like his comic book version isn’t the victory lap you think it is.
But that is a gripe that only comic book fans might have, and it might only be a gripe comic fans like I have. Non-comic fans who like their action films big, loud and stupid might like the film a lot. But if you don’t like action films at all, or hate the plot inconsistencies in them, Kraven the Hunter might not be your thing.
