[COLUMN] That's So Craven: Disjointed Thoughts on Kraven the Hunter | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece may contain spoilers for Kraven the Hunter. It may not. I am honestly not sure if Kraven has a story that can be spoiled in the conventional manner, although if you’ve seen a Sony Pictures live action superhero movie recently, you know what to expect. Still, proceed at your own risk.

Director J.C. Chandor’s films are about the seductive allure of the abyss, the siren call of oblivion.

In Margin Call, trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) leans over the edge of the roof of his firm’s Manhattan skyscraper. “You know the feeling that people experience when they stand on the edge like this isn't a fear of falling?” he explains. “It's the fear that they might jump.” This sentiment is mirrored in A Most Violent Year, when Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) explains his reckless business decisions by arguing “that when it feels scary to jump, … that is exactly when you jump.”

This is also a visual metaphor through his films. Towards the end of All is Lost, the anonymous protagonist (Robert Redford) seems to surrender to the cruel ocean that has cast him adrift. He allows himself to sink into the black void, swallowed by the darkness beneath the ocean. Towards the end of Triple Frontier, the characters realize the folly of their greed, and toss their stolen loot into a mountaintop crevice so deep and bottomless that the money just disappears into shadow.

However, Kraven the Hunter marks a departure for the once-young and once-promising director. Kraven the Hunter is not about the allure of the abyss. In a somewhat unconventional approach, the latest Sony Pictures Spider-Man spin-off movie is the abyss. It may not be particularly deep, but it is dark, dank and bottomless. One can only hope that Chandor found those bags full of cash waiting for him inside that darkness, because then at least somebody would have profited from this.

Kraven the Hunter is eerily similar to Morbius or Madame Web, but without any of the redemptive charm of the former’s boarding school bromance or the latter’s Dakota Johnson press tour. There is nothing in Kraven the Hunter remotely as entertaining as watching Cassandra Webb (Johnson) boldly announce that she doesn’t want to drink any stupid product placement Pepsi as it becomes abundantly clear Johnson has never opened (or perhaps even held) a canned beverage before in her life.

Kraven the Hunter is bad in a variety of predictable ways. The basic concept of making movies about Spider-Man villains that suddenly have no ties to Spider-Man because Tom Holland is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to be a very basic flaw. The movie heavily relies on frankly terrible visual effects. There have obviously been heavy reshoots in the two-and-a-half years since it wrapped production. It can often seem like no two cast members were on set at the same time.

Although not quite as obvious as the redubbing of Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) in Madame Web, there has been copious amounts of automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) in Kraven the Hunter. Characters have a strange tendency to breathlessly deliver mountains of plot exposition while their backs are to the camera or while the scene has cut to their screen partner or an insert shot of a prop. It seems likely that Ariana DeBose's performance as Calypso Ezili has been entirely redubbed.

It is appropriate that the film’s villainous henchman is named the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), as he seems to have been dropped in from another movie. He spends most of the movie arriving at locations adjacent to (but not exactly at) earlier action scenes after the primary cast has left, interacting briefly with extras, and then shuffling to the next scene. He largely communicates with the villain Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) through the art of shot/reverse shot and voiceover.

Much has been written about the concept of “superhero fatigue”, often focusing (understandably) on the economic implications of the collapse of the genre as a license to print money. However, this year the “fatigue” in question felt more existential and creative, working its way out through the films themselves as much as through the audience’s collective shrug towards any superhero film not titled Deadpool & Wolverine.

Deadpool & Wolverine was an existential howl at the vacant throne of an absent god, a trip through “a vast wasteland” of abandoned and forsaken pop culture. Venom: The Last Dance was the rare superhero movie to seriously meditate on the idea (and even the appeal) of death. Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux was effectively a raised middle-finger to both the audience that desired it and the studio system that mandated it. This year, the superhero genre was working through something.

Kraven the Hunter lacks any comparable or coherent observation about the state of the genre. Instead, the film speaks for itself. It feels like the genre’s stale reheats, the rotten leftovers from some great feast that reached its culmination more than five years ago. This is obvious even looking at the ingredients. These films have been going so long that they aren’t just recycling plot beats or story structure, they’re recycling actors.

Kraven the Hunter is not the first time that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has played a superhero. It’s not even the second time that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has played a superhero. Taylor-Johnson first played a superhero in Kick-Ass, over 14 years ago. This isn’t the first time that Russell Crowe has played the father of a superhero; more than a decade ago, he got to play Superman’s (Henry Cavill) dad in Man of Steel. This engine has been running on fumes for so long that there aren’t even new actors to cast in these roles. It’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Iterations upon iterations.

Kraven the Hunter is the fifth film from Chandor, who was one of the most promising directors to emerge during the 2010s. Chandor built a reputation for himself by making sorts of movies that don’t really exist any longer. Margin Call was a talky adult drama about the financial crisis. All is Lost was a one-man survival thriller. A Most Violent Year was a moral parable set in New York City in 1981. Even Triple Frontier was the sort of men-on-a-mission programmer studios used to crank out.

In the old days, a talented young filmmaker like Chandor would make a couple of independent movies, then a couple of mid-budget movies, and then finally be trusted to make a reasonably high-profile studio release. James Mangold stands out as one of the last directors to really enjoy that sort of career trajectory, getting to crank out a wide variety of movies at various budget and prestige levels. In contrast, Chandor illustrates that this path no longer exists.

Chandor worked prolifically during the early 2010s. Margin Call came out in 2011, All is Lost was released in 2013 and A Most Violent Year landed in 2014. After that, Chandor’s productivity slowed considerably. It took Chandor five years to make Triple Frontier, and that was made at Netflix rather than at a traditional studio. It took Chandor another five years to see Kraven the Hunter actually get released. How many other films could he have made in that time? How many better films?

Even a couple of decades ago, it was possible for respectable filmmakers to produce audience-pleasing genre fare at the major studios. Christopher Nolan’s first film at Warner Brothers was Insomnia in 2002, a remake of a Norwegian noir. That same year, David Fincher made Panic Room for Sony Pictures. Spike Lee made the heist movie Inside Man for Universal Pictures in 2006. These are all pulpy crowd-pleasers, made by auteurs working with major studios.

Indeed, there was even a time when Hollywood had a healthy ecosystem of reliable action filmmakers like Renny Harlin or Tony Scott, directors who weren’t regarded as generational talents, but who had their own aesthetics and a personal style that could consistently apply across populist fare like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Beverly Hills Cop 2. None of those movies are all-timers, but they retain some distinct identity.

There is a popular pastime on social media of film fans picking screenshots from some random and schlocky 1980s or 1990s studio programmer, and being impressed by the way that the shots in these seemingly disposable films are framed and lit. The clarity of these images, the visual choices and the care in their production contrasts with the washed out blurry grey out-of-focus primed-for-streaming-compression aesthetic that defines so much modern cinema, including Kraven the Hunter.

Even in terms of genre, the kinds of films that these sorts of directors can make with traditional studios have narrowed considerably. There are exceptions, of course. Nolan is powerful enough to get to make whatever movie he wants. Universal Pictures seem to be granting directors like Jordan Peele or Robert Eggers considerable autonomy. However, most of these filmmakers are basically herded on to the blockbuster franchise assembly line to make movies like Kraven the Hunter.

It feels like there is an entire generation of promising and talented filmmakers that have lost years to this franchise machine. Some have even talked candidly about it. Nia DaCosta has acknowledged that despite her directorial credit, The Marvels is not really her film: “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie.” Candidly discussing the digital filmmaking on his upcoming Lion King prequel, Mufasa, director Barry Jenkins conceded: “It is not my thing. It is not my thing.”

To be fair, Chandor has been fairly game during the Kraven the Hunter press tour, talking about the challenges adapting the character for the screen and his desire to adapt Kraven’s Last Hunt. Of course, even setting aside the film’s poor box office prospects, the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters is reportedly being quietly euthanized after this, so it’s unlikely Chandor has to worry about that. This seems to be Chandor’s “one for them”, and hopefully he got a big cheque for it.

Still, as an audience member, the real tragedy of films like Kraven the Hunter is watching these cynical, soulless and factory-built franchise films devour a generation of incredibly talented filmmakers who deserve the opportunity to make much better films. This isn’t just a loss of years of these directors’ lives, it’s the waste of audiences’ time. That is truly craven.