HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – Kraven the Hunter is the latest in Sony’s expanded Spider-Verse films to focus on villain origin stories. With his thoroughly ironic fan base, Morbius (2022) followed on from the first two Venom films (the third was released earlier this year), which may be the series’ only qualified success. In quality, Kraven the Hunter is much closer Madam Web (2024) than the other films because it’s a boring, directionless blob of film rather than something that could be considered so bad that it’s ironically good.

Director: JC Chandor, Kraven the Hunter Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as Sergei Kravinoff, later known as Kraven. Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger and Alessandro Nivola round out the cast. The film is primarily about Kraven’s relationship with his father (Crowe), but the film is so directionless that it’s difficult to give a good summary of the film’s plot. There is a kidnapping plot involving Kraven’s brother (Hechinger), and Kraven is also hunting evildoers connected to his father’s criminal empire. These storylines are so jumbled that it’s difficult to identify a driving force behind the film’s plot.

The dialogue is creepy, including the line: “My grandmother died, and then I never saw her again.” Is that how it works? It’s easy to make fun of the worst examples of bad writing, but the problems go deeper than just the tasteless dialogue. There is no character development beyond the broadest and most obvious beats. And as strange as it may be, the fact that the antihero gains his powers through a random magical elixir and lion’s blood getting into one of his wounds flies in the face of the kind of realistic filmmaking that characterizes modern superhero films.

The action sequences, which are usually the hallmark of comic book films, are rather boring. Kraven the Hunter makes little use of its R rating aside from a few swear words and some bloody violence, and its action sequences are full of obvious special effects or predictable car chases.

Some bad movies are offensively, aggressively bad – the kind of bad that makes me angry for being in the presence of the movie, the kind of bad that feels like a personal insult. Kraven the Hunter is just bad. It’s not the travesty that early reviews made it out to be, as the film never tries to be anything more than a comic book movie that would have been better released in the mid to late ’90s. Kraven the Hunter is easily forgettable, and aside from Sony’s most daring Spider-Verse films, it falls squarely in the bottom tier of the genre.

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