Whether you’ve known it as the SSU (Sony’s Spider-Man Universe or the SPUMC (Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters), there’s no doubt that Sony’s SPUMCed their handling of the Spider-Man-free connected universe up the nearest wall with their output. Ever since Spider-Man 3 screwed the pooch by including too many villains, Sony has been producing mostly subpar Spider-Man product in a manner that suggests that they genuinely have no idea about what they were doing or what they were hoping to achieve. This reached a crescendo with their connected Spider-Man universe that not only didn’t contain the Web slinger himself, but delivered a steady supply of crappy origin stories for characters who never truly deserved one. Admittedly, the Venom movies were passable, but Morbius and Madame Web were so badly received, they became legendary in the amount of mocking memes they generated.
Well, now it seems that the SSU has thrown in the towel and announced that it’s done – bit the fact that they did it two days before the release of their final entry, Kraven The Hunter, proves that they still had some bad decisions left in them yet.
OK then Sergei Kravinoff, let’s wrap this up quickly, shall we?
After an incident during his childhood that saw him go on safari with his crime boss father, get mauled by a huge lion and then get saved by a mystical potion delivered by the grandchild of a fortuneteller, young Sergei Kravinoff discovers that he has enhanced abilities – but instead of getting the therapy he obviously needs, he decided, obviously, to become a feared, legendary, global vigilante named Kraven The Hunter and target criminals in an attempt to dismantle his father’s criminal empire. As hobbies go, Kraven’s made quite a good go of it, breaking into Russian gulags to murder badniks with the tooth taken from a tiger skin rug and generally spreading fear among his enemies, but matters somehow get even more personal when rival crimeboss Aleksei Sytsevich (aka. The Rhino) targets him.
Before you know it, his simpering, fearful half brother, Dimitri, has been brought into the mix as a bargaining tool and even though it pains him to do so, he has to do his father’s wishes and tale out one of his rivals if he wishes to get his brother back alive.
Aiding Kraven on his journey is Calypso, the young girl who initially gave him his powers, but who now is a lawyer working in London, but matters get a bit more thorny when you realise that Sytsevich is not only ruthless, but has a rather alarming habit of turning into a nigh-indestructable Rhino man when he’s off his medication. But even if Kraven can score a win over a guy who can headbutt trucks and get his brother back, can he trust his notoriously untrustworthy father to not stick his nose in in order to take advantage of everything?
There’s a line in Kraven The Hunter that states something like once you get on his list, you never get off – however, not long after says that phrase and then gets killed, we get a shot of Kraven clearly crossing the name off in a ledger… this is exactly the kind of film Kraven The Hunter is as it takes turns of being openly confused with its own plot and curiously boring for a film that’s trying to be a multitude of things at once. Of course, this means that Kraven is just the latest in a long line of Sony screw ups that’s resulted in possibly the most inept connected universe in cinematic history. Oh sure, the recently buried DCEU was insanely divisive, but at least there was some good stuff in there; when a high point of your franchise tend to be Venom: Let There Be Carnage, you know you’re fucked.
Once again, the exact same problems that plagued both Morbius and Madame Web rear their head to condemn Kraven to the exact same fate and you have to wonder if the people in charge of the SSU are actually pulling some sort of tax scam, or if they’re really this continuously clueless about how to make a superhero movie work. Once again, the stench of post production meddling is overpowering as scenes quite prevalent in the trailers (aka. all the shots of Kraven in his comic accurate lion vest) are incredible suspicious by their absence and some characters change bizarrely as the movie goes on. Take Ariana DeBose’s Calypso for example whose character takes so many strange, sudden turns you feel she was rewritten into oblivion during the two year wait it took to get the movie into theatres. While Calypso was originally a scantily clad voodoo priestess in the comics, her shift to laywer is understandable, if noticably odd (would you want to be represented by someone with the same name as a lemonade drink?), but as the film goes on, movie adds ever more ridiculous wrinkles to her plot (while still curiously maintaining comic accurate earings) that you can’t help break put into laughter everytime the poor actress has to try and make it seem natural.
Of course, what with this being Sony, all the characters involved undergo illogical changes from their comic personas to the point where you wonder if anyone on the film has actually read them. Fred Hechinger’s Dimitri, destined to become the face shifting Chameleon, is a club singer who can mimic Tony Bennett; Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino wears a medical backpack to stop him morphing into a horned cave troll and Kraven himself has gone from a super powered hunter who is obsessed with Spider-Man to an animal loving fusion of Tarzan, James Bond and The Punisher thanks to a complete and total lack of Peter Parker.
However, swirling somewhere in this whirlpool of terrible filmmaking lurks thr odd nugget of worth. Like Morbius and Madame Web, Kraven isn’t anywhere near as unwatchable as the critics say, but it seems that a neckerchief wearing Russell Crowe (now fully in his I-don’t-give-a-fuck phase) and Nivola are fully aware of the turkey they’re in and adjust their ludicrous Russian accents accordingly. Similarly, Aaron Taylor-Johnson seems to be either utterly obvious to the pure drivel he’s headlining or he just is too fucking cool to care as he swaggers his way through the film using his what-the-hell attitude and his sculpted abs to protect him from the worst of it – but while his skill set results in sporadically OK action sequences and chases, his abilities are simply that of Captain America’s but with added bird vision that’s really made horribly obvious when the movie actually copies the scene from Civil War where Cap restrains a helicopter with an iconic bicep curl.
Maybe this all wouldn’t be so depressing if some hack had been dragged in off the street to helm this thing, but J.C. Chandor has a fairly decent track record with movies like A Most Violent Year and All Is Lost under his belt, but the director seems stuck between appeasing an uncertain studio while making a Russian gangster movie, a vigilante thriller and a superhero flick with a main character most famous for blowing out his own brains with a hunting rifle when his Spider-Man cosplaying experiment goes according to plan. Comic books, eh?
And so, as Kraven ends with teases of future stories that will never come to pass, we pack the last shovel of dirt onto the coffin of possibly the least loved connected universe is history – hmmm, maybe second place after Tom Cruise’s The Mummy tanked the Dark Universe before it even started – all we can do is hope that lessons have been learned and that Sony just continues to let Marvel make their live action Spider-Man movies for them.
Kraven’s first hunt has instantly become his last.
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