KRAVEN THE HUNTER

'Madame Web' is a trainwreck of a film but a fun watch, it's just such a mess that it becomes an enjoyable delight to experience. 'Kraven the Hunter' is better made but more frustrating because there are five different films trying to fight their way out. It was originally slated for January 2023 release, then October 2023, August 2024 and now is releasing in December 2024. 'Kraven the Hunter' feels like a project that was given too much time; watching back the trailers there was so much left on the cutting room floor and so much added that just bloats it. The story leads to so many pointless dead ends and is just messy. You can see maybe not a good film but a fun film somewhere in here - but as it is, boy, is it rough.

'Kraven' clearly had extensive reshoots that just inflated this into something interesting. From what I could piece together, the big changes are the childhood backstory which is almost 40 minutes of the entire film. This easily could have been cut to a 10-minute prologue - it did not need to take up as much time as it did. This also directly affects the film's third act, where most of the cuts appear to be made. Kraven fights the two antagonists, and then we get three different endings. One with his dad, another with his brother which features a clear twist that would have been the third act, and then Kraven getting his iconic jacket... which is actually the finale shot of the film, an interesting choice, since all of the trailers feature action sequences with this jacket and none of that made the final cut. This change caused another issue - that lack of action in this action film. Again, if we didn't have also 40 minutes of teenage Kraven and the original third act, the pacing of the action scenes would have been smoother. One last effect of these reshoots is the lack of Calypso in the final cut, who is a voodoo priestess and love interest in the comics. Here, she is just kind of there, occasionally helping with information dumps but primarily useless to the narrative.

They simply left this film in the cooker for too long, and what could have been another 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' comes across as a misguided, bloated film. It should not have been hard to make a fun MA15+ action film, be that intentional or not.

The casting is also interesting. While I love Aaron Taylor-Johnson, if we look at how the character is portrayed in the comics he's a beefy wrestler type; Florian Munteanu comes to mind as the prefect casting. Also, he's Russian and always sounds like a British man doing an American accent. Taylor-Johnson is still extremely fun to watch, but he does not have a film that backs him. Alessandro Nivola is only one bringing some camp to this film and truly eats up every scene. He injects a bit of life into this mess.

'Kraven the Hunter', might be more polished compared to 'Madame Web' and 'Morbius' and even the first 'Venom' film, but its bloated plot weighs this down from being any fun. What could have been an easy fun popcorn flick really stumbles at every turn. At this stage, this is the last film slated for the SSU. While I enjoyed the ride I think it's time to put this to bed and quietly move on.