by ECI Released : 2024-12-13
J.C Chandler directs Kraven the Hunter and stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the titular character along with Russel Crowe, Fred Hechinger, and Ariana Debose.
The film has a cool opening action sequence and a solid performance by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff/Kraven the Hunter as he balances the physicality needed for the role with some comedic moments.
Beyond that there is not many positives in the film, the visual effects are atrocious, the film was edited quite poorly, and is missing several scenes shown in the trailers.
Kraven marks the end of Sony's ill-fated Spider-Man universe one that took established Spider-Man villains and allies (Morbius, Venom, Madame Webb) and gave them solo films (in Venom's case a trilogy) establishing their origin stories. However without the presence of Spider-Man, many of these characters just feel out of place and all these films suffer from bad direction, acting, and visuals. At the same time, Kevin Feige and Marvel showed how successful a well-acted, directed, Spider-Man film can be with the most recent one (2021's No Way Home) nearly equally the entire box office of Sony's 6 films despite not having a Chinese release.
In the future, I hope Sony learns from this failed experiment solely propped up by Venom's international success (the franchise made a fortune in China all other films bombed) and lets the creative team behind the excellent Spiderverse films handle any future non-MCU Spider-Man projects.
