Follow the path we have laid out for you Poison, Kraven the Hunterwhich hits theaters on December 13th, provides an origin story for one of them Spider-ManWhile simultaneously portraying him as an anti-hero tasked with defeating an even worse Big Bad, he handles the villains.

Why anyone should care about this evil character outside of the context of a Spidey adventure is a question that JC Chandor’s long-delayed film – made almost three years ago – doesn’t satisfactorily answer. A cheesy and pompous saga that was supposed to bring Sony’s live-action film “Spider-Verse” to a conclusion. If not the faltering genre as a whole, it’s an unspectacular affair coming together Wonder, TarzanAnd John Wick to depressing and unforgettable endings.

Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven (Aaron Taylor Johnson), is the favorite son of the drug-dealing gangster Nikolai (Russell Crowe), who, in an early flashback, takes his boy and his illegitimate younger brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) from New York private school to Africa to go on a hunting trip, during which he teaches them in his thick Russian accent, “no To be afraid of death.” . They are prey. We are predators. Men should be the only animal feared.”

Nikolai is a source of such exaggerated wisdom, informing his children that “the man who kills a legend becomes a legend” and that their mother died by suicide because “she was weak and mentally ill.” The criminal is obsessed with strength and weakness, making it clear that he sees Sergei as the former and Dmitri as the latter, although both resent him for his cruelty, with Sergei convinced that there is no honor in killing with a weapon; The righteous way to hunt is to hunt with the tools of the landscape you traverse.

When an encounter with a fearsome lion goes wrong, teenager Sergei (Levi Miller) is fatally wounded. Luckily, a young girl named Calypso stumbles upon him and pours a magic potion down his throat that she just received from her tarot card reading grandma. This brings Sergei back to life and fills him with the power of the earth, air and animals. 16 years later – after fleeing his father and abandoning Dmitri – he is now a mythical assassin known as the Hunter.

With Kraven, he takes out villains with extreme prejudices, such as a devious crime boss imprisoned in a maximum security Siberian prison. He also kills some poachers and acquires a list of new goons, after which he decides to find Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer he wants to work with to locate even more heinous targets.

The script by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway justifies its scenario with a preponderance of italicized statements that would hardly sound good in a trailer and would seem like the height of awkwardness in the full-length feature film itself. Graceless can’t even begin to describe Kraven the Hunterwhose story also involves Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), who met Nikolai on the aforementioned safari – and was rudely dismissed by him as a “nobody” – and has become an underworld boss with a grudge against the Kravinoff clan.

Thanks to a mysterious benefactor, Aleksei comes into possession of a surveillance camera video that proves Sergei is the famous hunter. To get revenge on Nikolai, he hires an assassin named “Foreigner” (Christopher Abbot) to eliminate Kraven – a welcome task for the sunglasses-wearing mercenary, considering he has personal conflicts with Kraven and dreams of doing so , to execute “nature’s perfect predator.” ”

Symbolic for Kraven the HunterThe alien’s superpower lies in his patchwork minority – it’s never clear whether he’s freezing time when he counts to three or teleporting really quickly. Whatever the case, it’s a lame “trick” and Abbott isn’t given the opportunity to make his character interesting by gluttonously chewing the scenery. Not so with Crowe and Nivola, who appear to be taking part in a competition to see who can overdo it more boldly. Nivola wins this competition, especially when he reveals that to cure his vaguely defined illness he visited a doctor who made him strong, but with one side effect: without medication, which is constantly fed into his stomach through a tube , his skin hardens into an indestructible fur and he turns into the rhinoceros.

Nivola makes weird non-Rhino noises, Crowe spits cartoon spite, and Hechinger does his best Tony Bennett and Ozzy Osbourne impersonations as Dmitri, destined to become the Chameleon. None of this matters, however, because Kraven the Hunter doesn’t care about character, drama, suspense or logic; It’s largely a series of perfunctory connective tissue scenes (marked by terrible dialogue) sandwiched between boring showcases for Kraven’s power and agility.

Taylor-Johnson’s protagonist is nimble, powerful and agile, and director Chandor has a penchant for depicting him sprinting on all fours and scaling walls like his web-slinging cartoon nemesis. Although he murders his prey with excessive violence, he does very little of interest during the course of his first film appearance. Nonetheless, his routine performances are still more appealing than the film’s ferocious beasts, which were created with shockingly shoddy CGI.

So second rate Kraven the Hunter that it’s hard to understand why Chandor – whose previous credits include margin call, Everything is lostAnd An extremely violent year– was attracted to the project from the start. Also up for debate is what happened to his previously deft touch, as his latest piece is a ponderous throwaway devoid of precision and personality.

As it gets closer to its end, the film begins to entertain sequels (and Spidey connections), but at this point the idea of ​​further Kraven films has become completely implausible. While the writers and director bear most of the blame for this situation, the cast also bears some responsibility, be it the wooden, constantly posing Taylor-Johnson or the blank and flat DeBose.

Kraven the Hunter is an attempt at brand expansion that never justifies its independent existence and does lasting damage to the franchise it seeks to strengthen. At least Tom Hardy’s Venom seems like a potentially worthy and entertaining opponent for Spider-Man; Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven is just a preachy, egotistical bore with a nonsensical code and an incongruous conservation spirit. “Get to the point where I don’t give a fuck!” Rhino exclaims late in this feigned dangerous game. For viewers, this wait lasts the entire 127-minute running time of the film.