Kraven the Hunter
Why is it so bad?!
Kraven the Hunter (2024)
1 / 5
There’s a phenomenon afflicting streaming in the current period: second screen syndrome. The premise here is that nobody watching TV at home, regardless of what they’re watching, is actually watching the TV exclusively. Everybody’s scrolling their phone first; the TV is literally the second screen on in the room. It shouldn’t be hard to put your phone down and pay attention for two hours. Unfortunately, it apparently is. So hard, in fact, that movie MAKERS are clearly starting to take shortcuts, dumbing their product down so you can follow along while only half paying attention.
Kraven the Hunter may be a time capsule exhibit of this, because all its problems seem to rely on the audience not paying attention. The pieces of a cool story are here, in the Punisher vein. Kraven is a nifty antihero with elastic enough powers to give him a unique shtick. It would not have been a huge lift to make this something that could slot into the street-level Defenderverse inhabited by the Punisher, Daredevil, and Luke Cage. But literally all the details–how Kraven gets his powers, who gives them to him, what he’s trying to do with them, who he’s fighting against, his motivation and win conditions, his allies, his enemies, his lair–make no sense to anyone who’s paying attention. Part of that is a lack of baseline continuity. This is a Marvel movie with African overtones (and an African magical potion that grants superpowers!) that does not even speak the word Wakanda, much less imply anything Black Pantheresque about anything. Why not!? Well, logistically it’s because this is a Sony joint and I guess Sony can’t use Disney IP. But the filmmakers clearly just assume the audience will not catch that because they’re only half paying attention. And the whole movie is like that.
If you’re only half paying attention, there are enough Marvel-movie tropes slapped in here that you can catch the whiff of a story. There’s clearly a smoldery eco-friendly vigilante antihero with chiseled abs. There’s clearly a bad guy, and even several bad guys, and they’re like fighting to see who can be the boss bad guy or something. There’s an ally hot chick offering exposition and a complete-with-one-liner save for the hero at a critical moment. So if you’re scrolling on your phone while you watch this, you might be able to convince yourself you’re following along. But if you’re actually paying attention, none of those pieces fit together. Nothing follows logically from anything else. It’s a disjointed mess that effectively requires that you NOT give it your full attention. That’s totally nuts.
1 star of 5: Bad by any standard. Watch it with the same morbid curiosity with which you regard a car wreck.