This is a slightly expanded, lightly edited version of my review (Letterboxd, Mastodon) from right after I saw it last night.
Is 2024’s Kraven the Hunter good? No. Because these movies never are. Of course it’s not good.
Think about what this is for a second. 2024’s Kraven the Hunter is a Sony-made Marvel movie about the guy who hunts Spider-Man… that don’t got Spider-Man in it. Exactly like how Madame Web just aggressively didn’t have Spider-Man in it, just like how Venom and Morbius didn’t have Spider-Man in them. You already know what this movie is. To ask anything different of it is like expecting the weird store-brand M&Ms that are a little too sweet to change.
“Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters,” the SUMC, was, in the end, for that’s the terms in which we can talk about it now that we’ve been told it’s over, always a cinematic universe desperately searching for a Spider-Man, and it just never found him. It had Venom, who looked weirdly like Spider-Man’s black suit for no apparent reason, it had Spider-Man’s mum and Spider-Man’s uncle, and a guy who looked like if Spider-Man had an emo phase. And now it has Kraven the Hunter, who, I’m not kidding, gets bit, injected with modified animal fluids in the process, gets powers from that, learns lessons about what to do with power from a father figure, and then stalks around the world with spider-like moves. It’s not subtle. He crawls, as they say, walls.
But it never actually found a Spider-Man.
Outside of the fluke of the first Venom, these movies never really did numbers. When Sony got trolled into rereleasing Morbius it might actually, somehow, have done negative numbers. I found a lot of joy in the gonzo madness of the first Venom, and I’ll defend all three of those as fun rides, but these movies, they were never really for anyone. Nobody was jonesing for a movie about the guy whose one good story fundamentally has to have Spider-Man in it without Spider-Man in it. Maybe there’s a subreddit out there somewhere where they lose their minds over these, I don’t know.
Everyone, to get back to the movie, kind of understands the assignment. Which I think was probably… to make a bad movie. There’s fun bits. A good fight, a good chase. The CGI occasionally makes Kraven feel weightless in the world, and characters regularly teleport or know things they shouldn’t, but I liked several of the action sequences, and though it never actually intentionally managed to make me laugh, occasionally a body got flung around in a slapsticky way that got me. The closest comparison might be to the kind of generic action movies we see at Sneak Preview sometimes.
2024’s Kraven the Hunter marks the end of this particular side story. The end, fin, of a franchise that always felt like it was made to please the executives of another universe, one where not Iron Man but Daredevil and Elektra were the breakout superhero hits of the 00s.
So long to the SUMC. It never made sense in this universe.
But fuck, I really think I’ll kinda fucking miss it.