Kraven the Hunter skips over his Newsround and Countryfile days and gets straight to the supervillainy.

No studio in the history of movie making has managed to establish the kind of track record that Sony has in its handling of its Spider-Man-less live action Spider-Man Universe. Continuing to make the celebration of Columbia’s centenary feel more like a funeral than a festival, Kraven the Hunter falls to the ground like the final lily thrown atop the coffin of Sony’s superhero ambitions. However, unlike Morbius which was cowardly and boring or Madame Web which was weaponised awfulness to the point of contravening the Geneva Convention, Kraven the Hunter has enough about it that suggests that buried beneath the suffocating avalanche of executive notes there was at least the germ of an idea which might have actually worked.

Mauled by a wounded lion on a hunting trip and left for dead only to be conveniently revived by the application of a mysterious serum, Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller and later Aaron Taylor-Johnson), son of Russian oligarch Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) flees his father’s presence and hides himself in a Russian nature reserve once owned by his late mother. But when his younger brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) is kidnapped, Kraven is compelled to step out of the shadows to save him.

There’s a point, just before Dimitri is kidnapped where Kraven the Hunter seems, against all the odds, to be on to a good thing. Aaron Taylor-Johnson assumes the mantle of Kraven with commendable dedication, infusing the character with a primal intensity that hints at why he’s become such an enduring comic book character. His portrayal captures the internal conflict of a man torn between familial loyalty and personal vendetta, offering some depth amidst the surrounding mediocrity. Similarly, Russell Crowe delivers the goods, adding yet another accent-driven performance to his notable turn as Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder with his Nikolai Kravinoff, Kraven’s ruthless father. In his relatively brief screen time, he delivers a commanding and nuanced presence, elevating the material he’s been given. Fred Hechinger’s Dimitri, on the other hand, is achingly underdeveloped, especially for the big reveal the movie pulls at the end and ends up more a MacGuffin than a character. The less said about Calypso’s superfluity – save for her first act intervention – the better. Ariana DeBose has little to work with and does even less with it.

As multiverses are all the rage, let’s for one moment imagine there’s a universe out there somewhere where, instead of the flaccid Sopranos (Super-anos?) we ended up with, Kraven the Hunter was a movie about a super-Tarzan ecological avenger who worked his way through an oligarchical who’s-who of who’s-done-what as he takes revenge for the environmental damage caused by CEOs and moneyed trophy hunters alike, culminating in a showdown with his own dad. Man, I could have watched that movie for hours. Instead, we get one of the worst supervillains in cinema history with Alessandro Nivola almost unfeasibly unthreatening Aleksei Sytsevich aka Rhino, confirming surely for all time that the character just doesn’t work in a live-action setting. Unlike the mech-suit misfire of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Kraven the Hunter‘s superpower is having a colostomy bag which keeps his super-psoriasis at bay. When his final form is revealed, he’s like a combination of the elephant man and that big pile of shit that Jeff Goldblum remarks on in Jurassic Park. As if conscious of the paucity of its main villain, the film throws in a token comic book hench-character in the form of The Foreigner although if you don’t know who he or why he matters or, actually, exactly what his powers are from reading the comics, tough shit because the movie won’t bother to tell you – which is odd, because by this point surely non-comic book fans are the only ones still being duped into paying to see these sorry Sony movies?

Story choices and inconsistent special effects aside, Kraven the Hunter breaks new ground for superhero movies by adding egregiously bad audio-dubbing and ADR work to the mix, especially in the film’s earlier scenes suggesting that the obvious on-screen woes are as nothing compared to the post-production problems faced during its tortuous journey to the screen. No wonder it seems to be exhausted by the time it limps to its CGI-heavy, interest-light final confrontation. Plus ça Sony 🤷‍♂️.

Kraven the Hunter represents a missed opportunity to bring one of Marvel’s more intriguing antiheroes to life. Aaron Taylor-Johnson makes for a great Kraven and deserved so much better than this. But despite the valiant efforts of its lead actor, Kraven the Hunter is undermined by weak antagonists, a misguided plot, and technical failings that render it flawed and forgettable. It may be the best of Sony’s last three attempts at a Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movie but that’s not saying much. It’s a bar so low, it’ll be used for limbo dancing in hell – which is where everyone involved greenlighting the now mercifully defunct Sony Spider-Man Universe deserves to end up.