Face a towering wall of wretchedness worse than you could possibly imagine with the staggeringly defective supervillain bomb Kraven The Hunter. Shame on screenwriter Richard Wenk, who decided exactly the wrong direction to take. Shame on co-writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway for joining Wenk in typing out the catastrophe. Shame on director J.C. Chandor for not course correcting on what was supposed to be a hard-R supervillain splatter movie. Say that again, kids: “Hard-R supervillain splatter movie.”
I had been waiting years for this dried-out turd tube to come out, all because I thought a hard-R supervillain splatter movie about Kraven was a good idea. After all, during the ’80s, one of the greatest comic book writers who ever lived, J.M. DeMatteis, took a deep revisionist turn on the goofy tiger-pants-wearing Kraven. Imbuing the villain with a heavy dose of homicidal Hemingway-like mythos, DeMatteis had Kraven take a hunting rifle and blast Spider-Man out of the sky. Kraven then put Spider-Man in a coffin and buried him in the ground. Suddenly, s**t had gotten serious in comic book land.
“Kraven retrofitted as a hero is boring. His mean old dumb daddy, Russell Crowe, is boring.”
So, years later, a stand-alone Kraven movie seemed like an attractive proposition, just like the stand-alone Joker movies did. There is a bunch of old, scary-looking dudes like me that yearn to see what the comic code wouldn’t allow us to see: supervillains ripping people’s heads off with blood flying like confetti. This is what Kraven The Hunter promised to be, along with the origin story of Kraven and some third-string Spider-Man villains. So I was really ready to enjoy myself and be one of the few critics who was going to give it a chance.
So what do we get instead? We get yet another Taken rip-off with some Marvel characters instead of old dudes. Yes, this is the umpteenth squeeze at the withered globe-trotting kidnapping teat, with the accents and the black outfits and everything. I know some are tired of the now-conventional superhero genre, but switching to an even more worn-out cinema genre is not the answer. Especially color palette-wise, as everything is a deep shade of iron curtain dreary.
"…yet another Taken rip-off with some Marvel characters instead of old dudes."
