Kraven the Hunter review: "The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action"

Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) has been a mixed bag at best and an extended calamity at worst, with this year's dire double whammy of Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance seemingly putting paid to the notion of an MCU-adjacent supervillain chronology.

Having had its release date pushed back by over a year, Kraven the Hunter was anticipated by many to be the final nail in the SSU coffin. Next to some of its predecessors though, J. C. Chandor's film has a surprising spring in its step that, allied to some nimble action sequences, makes it rather more fun than the naysayers would have you believe.

Chandor's insistence on an R-rating (15 in the UK) makes a big difference, with little attempt to soften its title character's bloodlust and 'kraving' for human quarry. One late sequence, glimpsed in the film's red band trailer, sees him do away with pursuers with a bear trap, a spike-studded log, and an improvised body splitter, while his weapons of choice elsewhere include a lion tooth removed from a convenient rug and a giant William Tell-style crossbow.

Played insouciantly by Kick-Ass's Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven's other attributes include wall-scaling, tree-climbing, and the capacity to evade bullets, not to mention telescopic sight and super hearing. He is also a dab hand at boastful self-aggrandizement, at one point bragging he could even outpace karma if given the opportunity.

Natural born killer

How he got that way is explained in a lengthy origin flashback that sees his youthful incarnation Sergei Kravinoff (Pan's Levi Miller) mauled by a Mufasa-like CGI lion during a hunting trip in Ghana with his Russian mobster father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) and his lily-livered half-brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt).

Saved from certain death by the timely intervention of a local tarot card-reader (later to become Ariana DeBose's Calypso) and her mystic gran's DNA-altering elixir, Sergei comes back as a natural born killer with a Doctor Dolittle-like power to commune with wild animals. It's this that gives him the guts to quit his demanding patriarch, even if it means leaving Dmitri in his loveless clutches.

Cut to the present day where Kraven, like some nasty Santa, has a list of targets to implacably slice through. First to go is a Russian crime boss whose seemingly secure location – a subzero Siberian gulag – offers no protection from his resourceful stalker. Woe betide too any buffalo-slaying hunter who dares to kill bison on his land!

When Nikolai gets on the wrong side of a rival gangster, though, it is not long before Kraven gets embroiled in the beef – not least when Dmitri (now played by Gladiator II's Fred Hechinger) gets kidnapped as collateral and held for a king's ransom. "If I pay, I am weak!" says Crowe in a syrup-thick Russian accent, leaving it to Kraven to make Aleksei (Alessandro Nivola) suffer for his presumption.

Thank goodness for Russell Crowe

Had Chandor's film stayed an old-school mob yarn with a dash of All the Money in the World, it would probably have been a perfectly satisfying throwaway. What undermines it is its rather desperate eagerness to ally itself with the wider Spider-Man canon, through the introduction of Christopher Abbott's mind-controlling assassin Foreigner (a student, we are told, of the now dead Hitman), fleeting references to a certain Miles Warren (aka The Jackal), and a character’s late-in-the-day mutation into one of Spidey’s oldest nemeses. Given Peter Parker is a stubborn no-show throughout, we are left yet again waiting for the SSU's most persistently camera-shy Godot.

Nivola, meanwhile, has a serum that turns him into the hide-plated Rhino, a standard computer-generated gumby (think The Thing crossed with the Hulk with the skin of Guardians of the Galaxy's Drax) that makes one faintly nostalgic for the mechanized version Paul Giamatti so memorably gave us in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Kraven, in truth, comes across at times as a rather smug know-it-all, not least in a scene where his nose for a perfume alerts a stranger that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. As a man of action, though, he is never less than proficient, most notably in a barefoot chase scene through the city of London that ends with him being towed through the Thames by a helicopter. That's more action than DeBose sees as an investigative lawyer with a penchant for archery she only gets to show off once. As for Abbott: well, let's just say his ability to make people oblivious to his presence may end up being replicated in the minds of this film's audience.

Thank goodness, then, for Crowe, whose seasoned ability to elevate even so-so material makes his every appearance the guiltiest of pleasures. With his penchant for macho bromides ("Never fear death!", "Be one with nature!", "Always shoot to kill!") and prodigious appetite for alcohol ("Pour for men, not for boys!"), he brings a jolt of testosterone-dripping energy to every scene he's in that makes one wish he'd been asked to do more than another Zeus-style cameo.

To his credit, Chandor gives the actor an exit worthy of Shakespeare that comes topped with a nod to Brian De Palma's Carlito’s Way. Throw in an opening music cue lifted from The Hunt for Red October, and you have a film not afraid to wear its borrowings on its blood-splattered sleeve.

Kraven the Hunter is out in US and UK theaters on December 13. For more upcoming movies, check out our guide to upcoming superhero movies.