Rawr, next question
To love 'Kraven the Hunter,' you must embrace the soft, stupid animal within
It’s “Madame Web” with abs. It’s “Morbius” for people who love computer-generated water buffalos. It’s “Kraven the Hunter,” Hollywood’s latest misbegotten attempt to strip-mine Stan Lee’s skeleton for merchandise opportunities.
Why did Sony decide to make a bunch of movies about Spider-Man’s supporting cast in the first place? Um, well, they’ve owned the film rights since 1999. They saw how that didn’t stop Marvel Studios from making profitable movies about a talking space raccoon. They like money1. Adam and Eve talked to a snake one time. Why do any of us do anything?
Even as a lifelong Spider-Man fan, Sony’s off-brand film franchise didn’t lure me in. Never saw “Morbius.” Only watched the first “Venom,” but pretty sure I didn’t finish it. The unifying creative vision seemed to be, “Hey, fuck you, buddy.”
Then, I joined the zeitgeist earlier this year to see Dakota Johnson’s performance art piece, “Madame Web.”2 It was sublime. Inane. I wanted 10 more. That led me to see “Kraven the Hunter” on Sunday.
This movie rules. Everyone involved with it should be in jail.
Spoilers for “Kraven the Hunter” follow, but I think we can agree that’s OK.
Director J.C. Chandor’s art-by-board room blockbuster seeks to answer our most pressing cultural questions:
How can a comic book villain created in 1964 be reinterpreted as a modern protagonist and carry his own movie?
Do people want to see Crocodile Dundee dismember Russian mob enforcers?
Does ITT Technical Institute offer CGI courses?
Will history remember Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven as the first superhero with c*m g*tters?
The movie’s premise: Sergei Kravinoff (played by Taylor-Johnson) is the son of a Russian gangster (played by Russell Crowe’s gambling debts). This strapping lad with a pesky sense of honor is imbued with enhanced physical abilities after a strange near-death experience on a safari. Rejecting his cruel father’s criminal empire, Sergei leaves behind wimpy half-brother Dmitri (played by Fred Hechinger as an adult) and strikes out on his own. All grown up, he now hunts … the most dangerous game.3
Kraven from the original Marvel Comics is quite a different character. Just look at this hunk of antelope meat:
This Pier 1 Imports reward program customer who earn 10% off every purchase over $50:
This wild, carefree diva:
I’ve known Kraven from a young age. That loincloth is an old friend. Yet even I’ll concede that his original character brief is a lot for a mainstream action movie. Big game hunter driven to insanity. Probably Cold War propaganda against Russians. Goal-oriented, and that goal is Spider-Man taxidermy. Floofy.
Now, I would watch a movie about that guy. You would watch that movie.4 But someone with a yacht probably wanted a more conventional protagonist, so we got Taylor-Johnson as a charming jock in skintight leather pants.
The gag? Nothing about “Kraven the Hunter” is remotely conventional! It’s a superhero movie in the way that Mormonism is a denomination of Christianity. All the recognizable pieces are there, but arranged all weird.
For instance, this Spider-Man movie has no Spider-Man, so Kraven has to be Spider-Man. He quips. He realizes that with great power comes great responsibility. He gets his powers from an animal bite, except instead of a radioactive spider — I swear — it’s from a magic lion. He crawls on walls. He’s Peter Parkour.
Sony insists that these are Spider-Man movies, though, so when Kraven is dosed with a hallucinogen in one fight, he sees swarms of imaginary spiders. This is his greatest fear, we’re told, because his mother was afraid of spiders. Amazing.
Oscar winner Ariana DeBose is here, too, still cursed by a witch to flop. Her character, Calypso, first appeared in the comics in 1980 as an evil voodoo priestess (yeah, yikes) and Kraven’s lover. In the movie, she has two jobs: plot device and girlboss lawyer. Kind of a break-even sitch, there.
But why not ditch the character altogether if you’re just gonna dress DeBose from the Express clearance rack? That’s the funniest thing about “Kraven the Hunter.” It’s both slavishly devoted and deeply embarrassed by where it comes from. (Same, girl.)
Dmitri, Kraven’s brother, is a shapeshifting spy named The Chameleon in the comics. We’re checking boxes here, so movie-Dmitri can perfectly mimic people’s voices. When he sings “Sign of the Times,” for example, Harry Styles’ voice comes out. Don’t worry; this ability is never relevant to the plot, but Sony is the parent company of Styles’ record label.
Delightfully, “Kraven the Hunter” shoves multiple antagonists into the movie, including The Rhino (played by Alessandro Nivola). In the comics, he’s a big dumb guy in a big dumb rhinoceros suit, like so:
The film reimagines The Rhino as an unstoppable crime lord (OK, let them cook) who seeks power to take revenge on Kraven’s father for a past humiliation (alright, alright), so he goes to a mad scientist (hey, what?) who alters his genes to give him super strength and invulnerability (I mean, that’s fine), except that it also turns his skin into one big gray callus (now wait a minute), which eventually makes him grow a rhino horn (we could have done the big suit, no?), so he wears a tiny little backpack the whole movie that pumps him full of a serum that keeps him human (I’m calling the FBI).
I’ll stop. Just know that “Kraven the Hunter” ends with Taylor-Johnson finally accepting his destiny: to put on a sassy little fur vest.
The lunacies of “Kraven the Hunter” would have been been tamed by a single producer asking: Who is this for? But I’m glad they didn’t! No one made this movie because they really loved Kraven the Hunter. They made it for a PowerPoint slide at the annual shareholders conference. Any singular, cohesive vision from the Haus of Walkman would been boring.
This was the path to creativity. “Kraven the Hunter” makes choices — uninformed, fascinating, campy choices. It has teeth, which Kraven Taylor-Johnson loves to use as both jewelry and weapons.
Let go and let god. Get wild. Indulge your kraving.
One rad thing
A legend like Sheryl Lee Ralph is bound to drop bullet points off their resume. The current Barbara “Sweet Baby Jesus and the Grown One, Too” Howard on “Abbott Elementary” has plenty of material to work with: “Dreamgirls,” “Moesha,” “Sister Act 2,” “Wicked,” and so on. (My fave: She was the voice of Cheetah on the “Justice League” cartoon in the 2000s.)
Now, maybe everyone knew about Ralph’s 1984 dance-pop album “In the Evening.” I most certainly did not and came across it looking for her only other solo album, the 2022 Christmas collection “Sleigh.”
“In the Evening” is straight out of the Jody Watley aisle of the sub-genre supermarket. It’s full of groove-forward hooks that don’t sacrifice vocal power. The title track sounds like the kid sister to Chaka Khan’s “This Is My Night.” (The video is bananas.) “Evolution” has propulsive aerobics energy. Ralph’s theatrical delivery delightfully veers into Jenna Maroney territory, singing, “She’s an ACTRESS and a DANCER …”
Get into it.
Outbound messages
“Asteroid City” isn’t my favorite Wes Anderson movie. That’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — another story within a story within a story — by a meticulously stylized mile. But I did appreciate Anderson’s most recent film and feel compelled to give it a rewatch after I read a Slate essay from last year.
In “Wes Anderson’s New Movie Explains Wes Anderson,” writer Sam Adams emphasizes that the filmmaker’s style is his substance. Maybe not an original take, but it serves a greater point when talking about “Asteroid City,” probably Anderson’s most personal film.
I’ve never seen someone articulate the deadpan quality of these movies as a sort of emotional realism:
“Grief and loss haunt Anderson’s filmography as far back as ‘Rushmore’ … But his characters rarely wear that pain on their finely tailored sleeves, sometimes because they’re incapable of expressing it, but often because—they just don’t want to. Anderson’s movies aren’t emotionless—if anything, they verge on sentimental—but they don’t traffic in cathartic weeping or treacly catharsis. Sorrow is just something his characters learn to live with, like the piece of battlefield shrapnel permanently embedded in Augie Steenbeck’s skull.”
There are also a couple fun observations about Scarlett Johansson’s character. Sadly, nothing about Margot Robbie, who’s the best part of “Asteroid City” with probably 90 seconds of screen time. Read the essay here.
…
For your lore files: I listened to a lot of big band and swing music growing up. A mix CD for my seventh-grade birthday party included both Avril Lavigne and The Andrews Sisters.
One of my go-to’s: bandleader Glenn Miller. “In the Mood” goes hard. On Sunday, I learned that Miller went missing after boarding a plane in December 1944, never to be seen again. Earhart-style! Which one of you was planning to tell me?
NPR gave me the hard truth, about 20 years after my peak emotional investment. Come for the story; stay for quotes from a clarinet player named Peanuts Hucko.
They did not like money that much. Almost every one of these Spidey-less Sony movies made as much profit as a lemonade stand in Siberia.
Please, Madame Web was my mother. My friends call me Eric.
Man.
Let! Aaron! Taylor! Johnson! Hunt! Tom! Holland!