Tonight on Wild Kingdom, an apex predator faces extinction! Or worse, irrelevance!

When Kraven the Hunter introduces our protagonist Sergei Kravinoff, he’s aboard a Russian prison bus on its way to a Siberian gulag, stopping at an abandoned gas station so the convicts on board can go take bathroom breaks all around it. The metaphor works pretty well for Sony’s “Spider-Man Minus Spider-Man” cinematic pocket dimension: the gas station is the hollow shell of a system still making these films, and the prisoners are the cast and crew who signed on and contractually had to see them through to the end, but nobody said they had to give their best. Or maybe theaters are the gas station and studio execs are those turning everything around them into a makeshift bathroom.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: James Gunn proved you can hypothetically make any comic-book character cool, so Sony thought they’d go and do likewise. Reinvention isn’t for everyone, least of all the studio execs whose notes have been ruining superhero movies since at least Spider-Man 3. We left off with Venom: The Last Dance, maybe the least worst. For that one and for the apparent farewell to their Spidey Spinoff Showcase, our hosts hid behind their Columbia Pictures imprint (celebrating 100 years of endurance, says the title card! despite major misfires like this one!) to offer their last faint hope of cashing in on superpower cinema without having to give Tom Holland a raise. A little hope sprang from their choice of director, J.C. Chandor, who managed meaningful drama in A Most Violent Year and effective action in Netflix’s Triple Frontier. Glimmers of thoughtfulness are noticeable amid the sound and fury, but in the end it signifies exactly as much as you think.

As usual, the main character is a complete unknown to mainstream audiences. The Stan Lee/Steve Ditko version was a pompous big-game hunter who treated Spidey as his ultimate prey. Here he’s embodied by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the ubiquitous character actor who’s been a welcome accomplice in numerous films where he bounces off other costars with cheeky aplomb. (Age of Ultron! Tenet! The Fall Guy! Etc.!) As the headliner responsible for anchoring the film — as opposed to a foil who can get in, steal a scene, and get out — his Kraven is low on wisdom and charisma, all grimdark postures and low-energy quips as placeholders between underfunded CG action sequences that the editors diced into salad mix in hopes we’ll mistake split-second splicing for exciting, fluid choreography.

Commencing with Kraven’s origin: Levi Miller (A Wrinkle in Time, Joe Wright’s Peter Pan) stars in nearly one-fourth the runtime as Kid Kraven, who gets dragged on safari along with his kid brother Young Dmitri (Billy Barratt from Apple’s Invasion) by their swaggering Russian drug-lord dad (Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe) who wants them to forget their mom just died and thinks they should toughen up like Real Men so they can grow into big strong repressed Russian drug-lords too, albeit cursed with Mom’s niceness and American accent. A hunting accident befalls Sergei involving a raging lion, gaping wounds, and an unrelated teenage tourist named Young Calypso (Diaana Babnicova from Don’t Breathe 2) who’s coincidentally on a far less violent safari with her own parents and toting a magical healing potion that her grandma prophesied would come in handy. Young Sergei soon finds himself gifted with the strength, speed, agility, and mane of a lion! And lo, evil cowards everywhere shall call him…LION-O!

Ah, if only. Later in adulthood, Sergei walks away from his size-3X crime-dad and his puny brother Dmitri, now played by Fred Hechinger (Gladiator II, The Pale Blue Eye) as a lounge owner/singer who can mimic other people’s voices like some kind of CHAMELEON, which sure is a strange non-speaking animal they actually invoke for some reason that’s totally lost on mainstream audiences. Alas, Sergei rebuffs his dad’s reconciliation attempts, which are a combination of macho hectoring and poor gifting, such as having that guilty lion’s head stuffed and mounted so it can loom over him for the rest of his life or be handy for some other use, possibly fashioned into some sort of wearable item for a really flamboyant hunter. Evil Dad grows impatient because he has better things to do with his time, such as make sinister trap vor moose und squirrel.

Anyway, Sergei Kravinoff finds his true purpose as a vigilante calling himself KRAVEN THE HUNTER, who’s careful to explain it’s “Kraven with a ‘K'” (he actually says this!) because he realizes this film has no word balloons for the other characters to read, though he doesn’t also tell them, “And it’s Kraven with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘i’,” thus allowing for the possibility they’ll call him KRAVIN THE HUNTSMAN, which could be the title of the direct-to-Walmart-DVD-bin knockoff. Kraven comes up with a separate Eastern-Bloc-Wolverine accent for threatening his victims and starts putting offenders on his LIST, which is a thing he keeps that’s also mentioned in hushed whispers worldwide about The Legend of Kraven-with-a-K the Hunter. Evildoers on his LIST include random poachers he encounters by accident, a bunch of unnamed malcontents he apparently slaughtered before the movie started, and a particular tattooed man that was once mean to Calypso, now played by Academy Award Winner Ariana DeBose (West Side Story, Schmigadoon!), who’s grown up to be an “investigative lawyer”, which here means “a P.I. who can afford a nice suit”.

Soon his LIST also includes Alessandro Nivola (Jurassic Park 3, Face-Off) as Aleksei Sytsevich, one of Boss-Dad’s fellow safari-goers who has his own criminal goals in mind and suffers a rare comic-book condition that requires him to stay plugged into a clunky backpack at all times (I assume he sleeps on his stomach? And how does showering work?) or else he painfully transforms into a top-heavy digital monstrosity with tough gray skin, sharp horns, Popeye arms, and unchanged ordinary human legs, self-nicknamed the Rhino. He’s the worst CGI in the entire film (his final battle sequence repeats the same clip at least three times) and comes in pretty low if we consider pop culture rhinos ranked:

1. Tundro from The Herculoids
2. Rocksteady
3. Lord Rataxes from Babar
4. Master Thundering Rhino from the Kung Fu Panda-verse
5. Ace Ventura 2‘s undercover rhino disguise
6. Alessandro Nivola as a rejected Masters of the Universe action figure
7. Paul Giamatti in an exoskeleton

…but Nivola, following the lead of Matt Smith in Morbius or Woody Harrelson in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, truly gets how frivolous this all is and unleashes maximum wacky-eccentric energy to counterbalance so much gritty glumness. E for effort, sir.

By and large, the rest of the cast can’t catch up with him. Even after Crowe’s career jumped the shark (oh, for the days of L.A. Confidential or The Insider), he’s thrown his accent-of-the-week heft around in later films to some entertaining degree (cf. his Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder), but here he’s a growly, loveless man-mountain — in other words, a generic Russian boss. (His best scene might be his Simpsons-esque final fate.)

Taylor-Johnson can be slightly more interesting, whether in warm chats with his nice-guy brother or in the film’s best action sequence, a man-vs.-machine foot/car chase through the streets of London where Kraven finally accesses skills from something other than a lion for peak Tom Cruising to save the day. Granted, he’s sprinting like a cheetah rather than a lion, but still. Much as the film implies he can imitate many animals, like DC Comics’ Vixen or Animal Man, we never see him float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, or do anything that would require physical transformation or still more VFX dollars. Just imagine a final boss battle with the Rhino versus Kraven sprouting his own Rhino armor!

Chandor offers other salvageable, watchable, dare I say even good parts here and there. Kraven’s cleverest trick is using super-cat-stealth inside a Turkish castle (don’t ask) to follow oblivious goons from three feet behind for a good 40-50 feet. Or there’s the fateful moment of Kid Kraven’s first kill, shot below a foreboding horizon so we can only imagine the brutality of his first true act of violence while we’re held back on the other side of the line he’s crossed. But those fleeting Perfect Shots are outnumbered by so much other shoddiness — the unremarkable minion-kills, the rote car-flipping, Taylor-Johnson’s holodeck stunt double climbing walls for him in the longer shots, or (the most laughable bit) a surprise revelation of Sergei’s arachnophobia contrived with zero lead-in, possibly in response to some exec’s note to the effect of, “Add scene showing Kraven really hating spiders as motive for joining anti-spider league.”

If you’re up for a Blockbuster Video 2003 rental that might’ve marketed better if they’d called it a Manimal reboot, technically Kraven the Hunter is less worse than at least three of the other five flicks in this misbegotten series. Given time and less producer interference, maybe the Hunter could’ve found a surer footing in a sequel or two. Its disastrous opening weekend would appear to have sent Sony’s super-safari to the super-elephant graveyard with, alas, Kraven’s last hunt.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, Hulu’s Catch-22) is a C-list ’80s villain called the Foreigner, an international assassin who had no powers in the comics but shows up here with a three-second time-slowing power with no origin or so much as a one-sentence throwaway explanation. He’s arguably the coolest character anyway.

Yuri Kolokolnikov (Tenet, Game of Thrones) is Kraven’s first quarry, a crime boss doing time in the gulag but who’s so cool that the guards give him his own gulag office. It’s a pretty sweet life in the gulag if you can swing it!

How about those end credits? The movie’s last two scenes feel as if they were meant to air during and after the end credits — one capping off yet another Spider-villain origin, whose intro was clumsily foreshadowed and whose arrival is too-little-too-late (and amusingly demonstrates the fatal flaw in his powers); the other is the Secret Origin of Kraven’s Comics Costume, which was also foreshadowed. I noted a YouTube clickbait channel passing one of them off as an “end credits scene”, but in the final theatrical version, both precede the credits.

My son and I stuck it out to the bitter end and can confirm that, no, there’s no scene after the Kraven the Hunter end credits. Sony has seemingly given up their quixotic dream of fusing all their non-Spidey protagonists into one big supergroup that would somehow fight a hero who doesn’t even exist in their universe. The execs stepped out of their bubbles and let go of any delusions that Kraven would be their savior leaving anyone wanting more. The credits even omit any empty promise of “KRAVEN THE HUNTER WILL RETURN.” The most apropos coda would’ve been Sony CEO Tony Vinciquerra coming out of his lavish executive bathroom in a $2000 bathrobe and a $300 monogrammed towel wrapped around his head, shouting at the camera like Ferris Bueller or Deadpool, “IT’S OVER! GO HOME!”