Remedial Accent Work: The Film | Kraven the Hunter (2024) Movie Review
The hardest Aaron Taylor-Johnsoning Aaron Taylor-Johnson has ever Aaron Taylor-Johnsoned 🫨
I LiveSky film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
This is true. I work part-time as an usher/concessions person at AMC, and in the two weeks leading up to Kraven’s release, literally no one asked about it, talked about it, expressed even the slightest interest in seeing it…
And as of writing, Kraven made — in its opening weekend — a paltry $30.2M on a budget of reportedly somewhere near $150M. I’ve heard it said that Kraven the Hunter is the best among the SPUMM (Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Movies), which, I haven’t seen most of them, but that cannot be true.
This movie isn’t the best anything.
That’s the last time I’ll like anything in this film, spoiler alert. I don’t know whether Aaron-Taylor Johnson has resting bitch face or Kraven has resting bitch face, but that did work for me. Briefly.
Calypso is in this movie, and she has something to do with Kraven’s vague powers. She gives him a potion? I honestly might have napped through that part.
He’s fast as a cheetah, strong as an ox, cunning as a racoon, etc. It makes literally zero sense, and looks dumb onscreen 95% of the time. It’s basically Twilight powers on an even cheaper budget (not that much cheaper, though).
So, let’s talk about the ADR. If you’re unfamiliar, that stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement, and it’s a common tool for directors and filmmakers to use when sound isn’t adequately captured on set, on the day.
It’s not a crime to use it, and almost all films do to some extent. When you tend to notice it is when a new line of dialogue is inserted into the script after the script has been filmed, so the shot usually cuts to the back of the head of the person speaking.
If you notice it, it is a crime, or cinema sin or whatever else you want to call it (I think Cinema Sins sucks, btw; but it is a common term in our parlance now), and this movie is an unrepentant, incorrigible repeat offender.
Something major must have happened during the shooting of this script, because SO many lines are ADR’d, and every one of them is so egregious and noticeable. It’s mind-boggling. I think maybe they’re trying to have Aaron Taylor-Johnson at points match Russell Crowe’s energy/accent (good luck!), but hoo boy, it does NOT work, and this feels arguably like an unfinished film, as a result.
So one task ahead of this dumb movie, if it were to be made and be any good, is why is this guy’s name Kraven? The word ‘craven,’ from which the name derives its provenance, means, “contemptibly lacking in courage,” which is fine for a villain (though a weird name for one who is fearless and intrepid, like Kraven traditionally is), but doesn’t make a ton of sense for an antiheroic protagonist.
So the filmmaker made his last name Kravinoff, and Kraven is just a shortening of his actual, legal last name. So… great disguise. Just the first two syllables of your last name? Stop writing, it’s perfect.
To answer my rhetorical question, Russell Crowe was elevating this dumb, bad movie, but not much, certainly not enough.
Let’s address the ‘special effects.’ I’m just going to refer to them as ‘effects,’ because they are decidedly not special.
This movie’s attempts to make Kraven intimidating, fearsome, scary or impressive absolutely and utterly fail prima facie. He skitters, stutters, zoops and flips around like Yoda from Attack of the Clones, fighting lions, tigers, bears, some humans. Every time he is using a power that a normal man wouldn’t have, it’s one of the dumbest-looking things I’ve ever seen in my life.
There’s that old saying about how an infinite number of monkeys at infinite typewriters, banging away, over a long enough time, will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare. If you take that for granted, then the special effects team must have been eight monkeys sharing two typewriters over a long weekend. It’s ROUGH.
The script is no better. Everyone says exactly what they’re thinking or feeling at all times, no subtext — frankly, this movie doesn’t have time for it. It’s got numerous, long, unwatchable PS2 cutscene sequences, and needs its characters to transparently announce their intentions and feelings every time they speak.
Usually with the camera pointed squarely at the back of their heads.
In the grand tradition of insubstantial movies tackling substantive issues, Kraven features a male character murdering women and covering it up as suicide on their parts (it’s handled much more deftly by The Penguin in this same calendar year). I mean, we could tell Crowe’s Kravinoff senior was a bad guy from the way he chews up the scenery and comports himself, but if you had any doubts, he also murders women and then claims they killed themselves in a fit of pique.
So I guess now I really don’t like him? Good work, writers.
The vocal work from Aaron Taylor-Johnson is confounding, and throughout the film, it seems to spread to other parties or infect other areas of the production. My theory is that they had Crowe for a limited time towards the end of the shoot, and then maybe loved what he did so much (or realized they had so little else going on, performatively) that they retroactively wanted to match Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s vocal performance with Crowe’s, hence reshoots and all the weird ADR. So, reshoots and tons of time in the booth for AT-J. It doesn’t work. Ever.
Why is this movie rated R? Its only reason for existing is making money (though, that said, there’s some weird Sony principle at play wherein they were allegedly totally able to use Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, Miles Morales, etc. but just… decided not to? Because they felt audiences… didn’t want that?), and so it should absolutely be PG-13 to appeal to the widest audience.
Sometimes, films need to be R-rated to be true to the source material. Two great examples are Deadpool (any of them) and Passion of the Christ. If you’re going to film an epic about Christ’s Crucifixion (and why wouldn’t you?), it’s going to have to be pretty gory and brutal. If you’re showcasing the Merc with a Mouth, then he’s going to drop some F-bombs and tell you to look at his balls (I can’t imagine how disappointed I’d be if Deadpool didn’t tell me to look at his balls)(we’ll never know, because he did, a lot).
Kraven is violent, yes, but it isn’t a capital punishment carried out by the state. This movie could have been PG-13; I’d argue should have been, so it’s another absolutely baffling decision by Sony’s higher-ups.
What it leads to is a confusing mess with nobody to root for.
So I guess I’ve turned into some kind of puritan. To be honest, recent events like the CEO of United Healthcare Brian Thompson getting gunned down on a New York City street may have helped highlight how much I do not care for senseless, random violence (not that that murder was either senseless or random; but given I’m having to process and deal with very complicated feelings about real-life events, I have even less mental energy or patience for senseless murderers in my fiction).
One scene in particular sees Kraven get the drop on a poacher, and toy with him like a cat with a rat until he finds his name on his list and kills him with a crossbow after making a quip like he’s James Bond.
I haaaaaate it. It’s not cool. It’s not fun. It made me actively dislike Kraven, and frankly, the human-on-human, weapons-based violence is the most real and authentic in the film. Every time Kraven wrestles a lion or fights The Rhino, it looks like a mid-nineties cartoon. But when he’s killing soldiers, poachers and other humans, it’s way more convincing. And it’s definitely not heroic. Kraven literally pulls the trigger as the goon is begging for his life. Uncool.
Ultimately, as a character, as thinly sketched out as he is, Kraven manages to impress himself only as an edgy, adolescent prick throughout the film. I don’t know that there is a likeable character in this movie.
Most of Kraven’s ‘hunts’ read to me as a cry for attention. ‘Look at me, aren’t I tortured?’ I mean, yeah, I guess, but you’ve now killed a lot of people, too. So I am not sympathetic, at all, and to this movie’s credit, Calypso doesn’t seem especially into Kraven’s edginess, either.
So there are convincing, real-enough scenes of man-on-man violence and then absolutely laughable, uncanny bullshit CGI-based scenes that look approximately as real as X-Men: ‘97.
Holy shit, as more and more scenes of ridiculous CGI pile up, this movie becomes more and more unhinged. At one point, he is scuttling around the outside of a moving vehicle like a crab, and I was almost crying, I was laughing so hard. His very-serious face doesn’t match his ludicrously scuttling arms and legs. It’s insane.
Not worth it. While I think what the actor was doing with The Rhino was interesting(ish) early on, the transformation is insane.
The fight is absolute nonsense. None of it works; none of it looks any good. I start to get pretty irritated in my BlueSky posts, at this point.
Spoiler alert: Kraven the Hunter did not show me even one original idea.
So, according to my rating system of Good Movie, Bad Movie or Just a Movie, Kraven the Hunter is perhaps the epitome of Just a Movie. I don’t think it’s quite baffling enough to be enjoyable like The Room, but it’s not competent or interesting enough to work without irony, so WHO IS THIS FOR?! In their wildest dreams, who did executives think would like this?
Kraven the Hunter is Just a Movie, and one I would miss unless you’re on an airplane that gets hijacked and you’ve already watched everything else.
