Kraven The Hunter Review - A Decent Film Ruined in the Editing Booth
This article is a non-spoiler review of Kraven the Hunter after purchasing a ticket to watch the film.
Kraven is a weird one. Despite two years of reshoots and delays, I expected Kraven the Hunter to be edited somewhat competently, yet its final cut feels akin to a sleep deprived university student rushing an edit in the early hours of the morning before a project deadline. So much of this movie feels very amateur, almost as if a studio executive with no knowledge of how to make or edit a movie decided to load up Windows Movie Maker on their personal laptop.
That is not to say that all is bad about Kraven. I actually thought the opening eight minutes (that Sony also conveniently thought was good enough to release online as a marketing ploy) were quite competently made and enjoyable, and set the stage for a very solid comic book action film. The general story of the film was a serviceable one, with a troubled youth overcoming the corrupt morality of his father to form his own future, eventually becoming a vigilante hunter looking to take down a criminal empire.Â
The film has four antagonists at various points, but with a tighter script focused on just one or two, the film would have time to breathe. Streamlining other aspects, such as the nine international journeys made by the titular character would remove the abrupt pauses in the story, which makes the film feel like it resets every few scenes. There are some contradictions with the film that give pause for thought, notably featuring a man who slaughters drug dealers and poachers who kill animals for materials wears a jacket made of a dead lion’s mane. That is akin to brutalising farmers for killing animals while eating meat. There are also narrative holes in the film with no explanation that give such lines as the infamous “Somehow Palpatine returned” a run for their money.
Where the film really fell apart for me was the pacing. After an action-packed, fast-paced opening ten minutes, the film grinds to a screeching halt as the next thirty minutes are a slog through a portion of Kraven’s early life. Most of these scenes are not needed, and the end result is that the rest of the film, which appears to be studio mandated to fit within that two hour window, is choppily edited and has no rhythm. Despite the notion of kidnappings and impending deadlines, all tension is lost as there’s no sense of time in this film. The lead character makes nine journeys across the world in this film, but ultimately just teleports between them, leaving us with no idea of how many hours have been spent on the journey and how many remain, and leaves viewers feeling like the film reset itself. The film would have been better served reducing locations to two or three at a maximum, showing how Kraven gets from A to B.
The dialogue at times, is atrocious. The writing on a whole is nothing special, but every now and then, there is a line or two that leaves me astounded it made it into a Hollywood film. In a flashback sequence that is supposed to be from Kraven’s perspective, there is a scene between young Calypso and her grandmother conversing about tarot cards. How do I know Calypso’s name? Is it because she’s such a well-written and impactful character? No, it’s because her grandmother ends every sentence in this conversation with Calypso’s name: “Put the cards away now Calypso… Think again Calypso… I have something for you Calypso“. Nobody speaks like this in real life, I’d imagine Calypso knows her own name and wouldn’t need to be reminded every minute.
A later scene in the movie, also involving Calypso, featured perhaps the most nonsensical line I’ve ever heard: “She died not long after that trip and I never saw her again”. Well of course you haven’t seen your grandmother since her… death. That line I simply refuse to believe was written by the writers of the Equalizer franchise, or 2008’s Iron Man. I’d be willing to bet that many of these lines, at least those added via ADR (automated dialogue replacement), were either written at the eleventh hour by a studio executive with no writing acumen, or produced via a cheap AI machine.
The acting in this film was mediocre at best, and oftentimes robotic. One scene in particular included line delivery so bad I’m not fully convinced the character was portrayed by a real actor and rather an amalgamation of computer generated wizardry. On this topic, similar to Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter is jam-packed with ADR, clearly demonstrating this version of the film was produced in the editing booth. There are several shots which cut away from speaking actors, an age old trick to hide dialogue replacement, but there are several more where the speaking characters aren’t cut away from, rather the camera pans to a wider shot where the lips are clearly not moving with the dialogue being spoken (or they’re not moving at all). Some reads were so monotone, and with no partnering footage, that I’m left wondering whether the actors actually read those lines, or whether Sony used AI to emulate their voices.
Unfortunately, Sony learned the wrong lesson when fans pointed these scenes out in Madame Web, as a small selection of scenes appear to feature CGI lips on actors to say words they otherwise did not. One, almost laughable scene, towards the 1 hour 33 minute mark, features a still image of Calypso actress Ariana DeBose with CGI lips, eyes, and a little bit of added movement; the end result is reminiscent of Henry Cavill’s partial CGI face in 2017’s Justice League to remove his moustache during reshoots, but far more tragic, with computer-generated blinks and all. This only made a wooden performance evermore lifeless.
The most grievous crime made, was a poor misunderstanding of the source material. To me, it seems a Sony executive briefly looked at a comic cover, saw Kraven’s costume, and assumed he was some kind of “lion man”, and from that, wrote notes on his origin and the film’s story, turning him into some kind of protector of the animal kingdom. The reality is quite humorously the opposite. Comics Kraven was the world’s most proficient hunter who enjoys killing animals with his bare hands. Kraven was never a glorified Tarzan, he was a human hunter who stole a potion to somewhat enhance his physical feats. Sony seems to have an obsession with taking Spider-Man’s most iconic villains, and converting them not into anti-heroes like many like to claim, but fully fledged heroes. They never fail to do a disservice to the source material, and after I sit through every instalment, I’m left asking myself “why?”.
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‘Kraven the Hunter’ is a museum of terrible filmmaking
There are some good aspects to the film. I found Fred Hechinger’s descent from Dmitri to notorious Spider-Man villain ‘The Chameleon’ to be a believable performance that would have made for a solid antagonist in the sequel we’ll never get. Christopher Abbott’s character ‘The Foreigner’ was a well-performed, chilling foil to Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven that deserves applause in a sea of mediocre performances. Alessandro Nivola’s Aleksei Sytsevich was at times an odd portrayal, but when you step back you realise he’s the only cast member having fun with the silliness of it all, whilst everyone else just seems bored.
I can actually see how with some more competent editors and less last minute studio mandates, Kraven the Hunter could have been a pretty good film. Unfortunately, the film is rife with moments of poor filmmaking that makes it hard for many audience members to take it seriously. These issues I don’t believe originate from the original writing team or director, and I think instead are the result of studio interference, as several creative team members of Sony’s previous instalments have spoken about major studio changes to their films. I would actually be quite interested in a director’s cut of this film, and I would wager that would actually be a far more enjoyable version.
These moments are fleeting however, and are not the whole movie like many critics would have you believe; I believe that despite these, Kraven the Hunter is among the best of the Sony Marvel universe (which is really not saying much), simply because it is one of few which actually adhere to the three-act structure. It is not a film I would recommend for a cinema trip, unless you are either a fan of this universe, or you enjoy making fun of these films with your friends. For any comic book movie aficionados, it may be worth seeing just to be a part of the discussion, but I could never in good faith recommend this as a good film. If you’re going to watch it, wait for a streaming release.Â
Watch the first eight minutes of Kraven the Hunter below:
Kraven the Hunter released in cinemas today.
