Kraven The Hunter

What’s more surprising? That the superhero boom has led to a solo film for Spider-Man antagonist Kraven The Hunter?

That Sony’s non-Spidey featuring ‘universe’ has made it to a sixth film?

That this film hasn’t really succeeded in terms of box office and critical opinion?

Certainly not the latter, but someone somewhere at Sony clearly had the expectation that this would score.

It’s all too easy to continue to kick the ‘SPUMC’ whilst it’s down and, by all accounts, this film is the final nail in the coffin for this series.

But what’s increasingly hard to fathom is just exactly what the point of this all is, where it could possibly have got to and what they do now after its catastrophic failure.

Kraven The Hunter falls in with its kin and is a throwback to superhero films of the noughties.

The difference here is that it almost becomes a parody of those movies in parts. Now, not deliberately I hasten to add, but there are some parts of this movie so ridiculous, so cliched, so hackneyed and so bizarrely un-thought through that, had it actually been a parody, it could well have succeeded.

It will actually have you laughing out loud at points. Some of the script is so badly written that it is actually worth the price of admission to see it play out on a big screen with famous actors and expensive special effects. If Matt Berry was in the lead role I dare say it’d probably be the funniest film of the year.

Again, it’s so brazenly bad at points that you do wonder if it’s on purpose. The location titles flash up with places like ‘outside of London’ and ‘East Russia’ as if someone put a placeholder in that was never changed.

Lines of exposition come out like examples in a film class of what ‘expository dialogue’ is.

This has the cumulative effect of actually making the film unintentionally interesting. You want to see what will happen next.

There are also elements that are executed very well and show that this film has been in development limbo for a while. It does feel like a few different versions were made and stitched up but it largely, just about, holds together somehow.

It makes the editing quite a feat in its ability to largely keep the forward momentum of the plot but there are also clearly obvious joins. At one point a character is actually cut off mid-line.

It almost adds up to a classic ‘so bad it’s good’ film. There’s some sort of element of personality and some sort of element of strangeness that, when compared to the Venom sequels as an example, make it more memorable and more oddly likeable.

Russell Crowe isn’t quite chewing scenery but his ‘so stereotypical it again borders on parody’ Russian accent stays steady throughout the film and he’s matched by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s physical performance in the lead role.

He walks through the bad lines well enough to hold our interest and his singular goal (mercifully keeping away from any romantic subplot or real sense of other personality traits) actually works in context.

The film is like a big, dumb dog. Clearly incapable of writing or acting in a superhero film but nonetheless entertaining to watch roll around in its own filth.

If Marvel Studios want to bring these characters in to the MCU for a ritualistic massacre akin to the Illuminati sequence in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness I, for one, will be all for it.

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