Entire Plot of 'Kraven the Hunter' Recreated With Quotes From Scathing Reviews
Sony's Marvel Universe of Tertiary Spider-Man characters but no Spider-Man ends here, but Plot Recreated with Reviews is forever.
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There are a lot of things I miss about being a full-time staff writer covering film. Health benefits. A clear sense of purpose. Uh… okay, I guess that’s about it. Anyway, one thing I don’t miss is the expectation to see every supposedly high-profile comic book adaptation release.
This week brings us the release of Kraven the Hunter, a not-especially-terrible-looking adaptation of Marvel comic I’d never heard of before this movie, starring an actor I usually like (Aaron Taylor-Johson), from a director who has done a few good things (JC Chandor), and distributed by Sony, whose Marvel movies are at least generally shorter and less up their own ass than Marvel’s Marvel movies. Sometimes they’re fun even when they’re complete disasters. Maybe especially so.
That being said, it’s awards season. There are a million movies out or about to come out and there’s no way I’m using up my limited movie time watching something called “Kraven the Hunter.” Even if it looks like a reasonably satisfactory comic book adaptation, I’ve seen at least 40 of those by now (no exaggeration) and I can’t imagine this one is bringing anything new to the table. It’s distinguished mainly by being the final film of Sony’s snakebitten “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” (SSU), which consists entirely of characters from Spider-Man comics, notably not including Spider-Man — a group that also includes Morbius, Venom, and Madame Web. Sony actually announced that they were canceling this entire venture before Kraven even came out, which doesn’t exactly seem like a vote of confidence.
That actually helps explains the December release date too — they kept pushing back the release, for a movie that was actually shot in 2022.
Anyway, all of this helps makes Kraven the Hunter an ideal candidate for Plot Recreated with Reviews, a feature in which we attempt piece together every beat of a movie using only expository quotes from the reviews. Because some movies are just more interesting to hear annoyed critics describe than to actually see. The last time we did this was with another Sony Marvel movie, Madame Web, and it was so fun that I ended convincing myself to see the movie after all. I got the whole Frotcast crew to watch it for a podcast. It was a blast.
Maybe that will happen this time? I hope not. I have bloated, overhyped biopics and dour European slogs to watch!
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THE BACKSTORY
The screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway radically reimagines the supervillain, who was chiefly known as a big game hunter who wears a lion's head as a gaudy vest. (Mashable)
Turn-ons included animal prints, furry collars, and the sort of mustaches favored by old-timey Russian czars. (Rolling Stone)
In Kraven the Hunter, Sergei "Kraven" Kravinoff is a vigilante… (Mashable)
…played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a fang thong necklace, washboard abs, and the glower of someone who is right on the verge of delivering a monologue about the dangers of seed oils. (Vulture)
THE OPENING HOOK
In the film’s grabby opening sequence, (Variety)
…Taylor Johnson’s Sergei Kravinoff, who prefers to be known as “Kraven with a K,” (Chicago Sun-Times)
infiltrates a Siberian prison to assassinate a crime lord, which he does the old-fashioned way: by grabbing a tooth out of a saber-tooth-tiger trophy head and stabbing the baddie in the neck. (Variety)
Once that’s taken care of, he manages to escape by crawling up walls, running around on his arms and legs like a jungle cat, and punching and leaping his way to freedom. (Rolling Stone)
FLASHBACK TO THE ORIGIN STORY
The story then grinds to a near-halt with an overlong flashback from 16 years prior, (Chicago Sun-Times)
…in which a young Sergei (Levi Miller) and his half-brother, Dimitri (Billy Barrett), are whisked from a posh prep school in upstate New York to Northern Ghana (Rolling Stone)
…where a man-eating lion has killed several dozen people. (Indiewire)
Their gruff and brutish crime boss father Nikolai, played by Russell Crowe, who injects at least a measure of life into the proceedings with his thick, Boris Badenov accent (Chicago Sun-Times)
…is a fearsome he-man hoping to bag a mythical lion and wrestle a thick Russian accent to a draw. (Rolling Stone)
“There is an animal in each one of us,” he theatrically intones in his cartoon accent. And judging from Crowe’s performance, that animal is a ham. (Digital Trends)
LION’S BLOOOD
After informing the boys their mother has killed herself because she was sick and weak, Nikolai takes them on a big-game hunt. (Chicago Sun-Times)
The lion almost kills young Sergei but is restrained, perhaps, by his innate lion-ish respect for Sergei’s nobility – and like Crocodile Dundee with the water buffalo, Sergei actually seemed to be on the point of subduing the animal with his commanding-yet-empathetic gaze, before Nikolai started shooting. (TheGuardian)
Chomped in half after refusing to shoot the majestic creature with his gun, Sergei is only saved from becoming the beast’s next victim by a tonic given to him by a random little girl named (Indiewire)
Calypso Ezili, the granddaughter of a voodoo high priestess, who happens to be wandering through the brush at the exact same time as the attack. (Empire/Indiewire)
It gives him hallucinations that look like outtakes from a Terrence Malick film. (Empire)
Nikolai shoots and wounds the lion, and the lion drags Sergei away, and the lion’s blood mixes with Sergei’s. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Mixed with a drop of computer-generated lion’s blood, a pinch of Calypso’s magic potion is all it takes to unlock Sergei’s inner animal and endow him with the powers of nature’s greatest predators. The strength of an ape, the speed of a cheetah, the comic timing of a grizzly bear, and so on. (Indiewire)
And THAT’S how Sergei becomes ... drumroll ... Kraven the Hunter! (Chicago Sun-Times)
PRESENT DAY
Sick of living in the spotlight of his dad’s permanently disapproving glare, Sergei leaves home, learns the ways of the jungle (Rolling Stone)
…and makes an inventory of bad guys he starts to bump off. (Empire)
Eventually, Sergei — now going by Kraven — begins knocking off a growing list of poachers, corporate rascals and international kingpins. (Rolling Stone)
Although Kraven has no job or obvious source of income, he somehow maintains his own private cargo plane (with its own personal pilot on call 24/7) for whenever he needs to venture off to some far corner of the globe to stab someone in the neck with a tiger fang. (Screen Crush)
The criminal underworld he’s been violently targeting has given him the nickname “the Hunter” because he hunts the most dangerous game — guys who remind him of his bad dad. And yet he, for reasons unknown, has given himself a secret nickname that sounds like the word for cowardly. (Vulture)
No one knows he’s the mysterious figure feared by the underworld. They tend to just think of him as a guy who runs around barefoot most days and appears to have done a lot of high-intensity abdominal crunches. (Rolling Stone)
CALYPSO GROWN UP
While rejecting the values of his gangster father, Kraven seeks to save his brother from rival kingpin Aleksei "The Rhino" Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola, exhilaratingly eating this film alive in every frame). Along the way, he'll find an ally in Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer whose secrets include mystical magic potions and skills with a crossbow, (Chicago Sun-Times)
…who stalks around a London law firm in intense geometric jewelry and assertive shoulder pads and is incapable of delivering a single sentence in a normal cadence. (Vulture)
If you sensed they’d strike a deal in terms of finding and executing no-goodniks, because “sometimes the law can get in the way of justice,” we applaud your intuitiveness. If you also predicted this would play out in a chatty scene on a bench that goes on for five minutes but feels like it lasts 55 minutes, we truly admire your powers of precognition. (Rolling Stone)
CHAMELEON
Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) meanwhile, (Indiewire)
…who has the vague proportions of a Funko Pop, appearing to have been digitally shrunk down in some way so that he can look frailer than his brawny sib, (Vulture)
…has leveraged his chameleon-like ability to imitate people’s voices into a career as a lounge singer at the London nightclub that Nikolai bought for his beta male bastard son. (Indiewire)
Dmitri has a chameleonic ability to mimic others, including Tony Bennett, Harry Styles, and Ozzy Osbourne, I kid you not. Why, it’s almost as if Dmitri will one day morph into a character known as “Chameleon.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
When Dmitri is abducted, and the hunter is motivated by more than just righteousness in his hunt. It’s, like, personal now! (Rolling Stone)
RHINO
Now that the Russian crime boss is no longer in the picture, there’s a power grab for the top position, with Nikolai pitted against his archrival, one Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), (Chicago Sun-Times)
…a cringing beta male with a nerdy backpack and glasses. (Guardian)
We’re introduced to him with an emo fringe and a nameless “condition.” Years later he turns up as (Independent)
…a snarling mercenary who can turn into a human-rhino hybrid — kind of like the Hulk, only with even rougher skin and horns. (Chicago Sun-Times)
He has consumed a chemical compound which transforms him, entirely absurdly, into arch-nemesis The Rhino (Guardian)
…whose skin hardens into bullet-proof greyscale whenever he unplugs the medicine tube that sticks out of his sporty little backpack. (Indiewire)
At one point he caws in frustration like a bird of prey (Indiewire)
…a muted, prolonged shriek that no one acknowledges. (Vulture)
In reaction to bad news, he hisses like a snake, despite telling us – again and again and again – that he is, in fact, “The Rhino.” (Independent)
FOREIGNER
Perhaps to compensate for Kraven’s lack of a certain friendly neighborhood hero, the film tosses in several more baddies. (ScreenCrush)
Christopher Abbott is an assassin named the Foreigner who dresses like he owns an art gallery in Geneva… (Vulture)