In the 10 short months since I wrote my Madame Web review pondering the poisoned chalice of a superhero role in 2024, both Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans – the pillars upon which the MCU was built – have announced their imminent return to Marvel movies. Perhaps it’s too early to judge whether this is yet another example of wheels frantically spinning in the blockbuster mud, but the lukewarm reception to every single superhero property since Spider-Man: No Way Home seems to suggest the centre cannot hold.

Sony, for their part, have been trying to work out how to make a successful superhero film for the past decade. Although they own the rights to Spider-Man, the complex nature of their licensing agreement with Marvel means there are certain characters (including Spidey himself) they can’t use without mutual sign-off. Now, Sony own the rights to 900 comic book characters – so what’s the issue? Well…most of those 900 characters are related in some way to Spider-Man. Exes, family members, classmates, colleagues, alternate reality versions, and of course, villains. Extracting them from Spider-Man is difficult when many exist purely within his orbit.

It did work, however, with the Venom franchise, which netted Sony over $1 billion at the box office despite a lukewarm critical response. A passion project of Tom Hardy, it’s undoubtedly his, erm, unique performance that gave the Venom films their spark – something very much not present in their other spin-off attempts, Morbius and Madame Web. But third time’s a charm, right? What could possibly go wrong with…Kraven the Hunter?

Most famous as the Spidey villain obsessed with pelts and poaching, Sergei ‘Kraven’ Kravinoff has a long history with the web slinger dating back to 1964 and is constantly causing him bother despite his lack of superpowers. His motivation is to be the world’s greatest hunter, which for some reason, makes him view Spider-Man as the ultimate prey. (Has he tried putting a glass over him and covering it with a postcard?)

Updated for a solo cinematic adventure, Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor Johnson – who Hollywood continually seem unable to work out what to do with – and now develops lion-related superpowers as a teenager after being attacked by a big cat during a hunting trip in North Ghana with his brother Dimitri and father Nikolai (Russell Crowe in a cravat doing a Russian accent). He’s saved by a young Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) who gives him a potion her grandmother gifted her five minutes previously. After waking up with lion powers, Sergei swiftly rejects his father’s invitation to inherit his gangster empire and flees to the Russian countryside, where he appears to live unsupervised for the next 16 years in a Pinterest-worthy converted observation tower. Also, he can telepathically communicate with animals.

Meanwhile, geeky Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola, hammy) has been biding his time after a slight from Nikolai during that ill-fated hunting trip. He’s adopted the monicker of Rhino following a procedure which gave him impenetrable grey skin and wants to replace the Kravinoff at the top of the criminal food chain. He enlists the help of a mysterious assassin known as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, disassociating) who has his own personal beef with Kraven, and kidnaps his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger, having a weird 2024) in an attempt to make Nikolai look bad. It’s up to Kraven to hunt them down.

It’s all desperately silly. Perhaps that would be less of an issue if the film’s writers, stars and director leaned into it a little – as in the Venom films – but there’s an air of seriousness about Kraven the Hunter that makes it a slog that can’t be saved by a surprising number of violent executions, including one involving a bear trap. It doesn’t help that Kraven lacks a sense of purpose beyond hunting (“people” he clarifies; he’s an animal lover in this iteration) and the relationship between the Kravinoff brothers feels painfully undeveloped to the extent other characters have to explain how much they care about each other. Exposition isn’t so much clunky as it is violently hacked up onto the carpet like a hairball.

If there’s one thing to say in Kraven the Hunter’s defence, it’s that it isn’t quite as bad as Morbius or Madame Web. At least everyone here seems to be enjoying themselves a little rather than looking like they’re doing community service at a failing theatre. But professionalism can’t make up for a weak plot, comically bad animal CGI, cringy dialogue and the unfortunate truth that Aaron Taylor Johnson looks like the Nightman when he goes Beast Mode.

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