Russell Crowe stuck between credibility and camp in blockbuster shocker

KRAVEN THE HUNTER ★½

(MA) 127 minutes

I’ve pondered this before, but the riddle remains: in an age of increasing sensitivity to the perils of cross-ethnic casting, why are all restrictions lifted when it comes to playing Russians? The latest star to take advantage of this freedom is Russell Crowe as gang boss Nikolai Kravinoff, a gruff, heavily accented bear of a man, pouring out the vodka and lamenting America has made his sons soft.

In the event, Nikolai has nothing to worry about when it comes to his elder son, Sergei – the title character and hero of Kraven the Hunter, played in his sensitive youth by Australia’s Levi Miller, and in his ruthless prime by British actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who does have some Russian ancestry, for what that’s worth).

Long-term Marvel comic fans will know Kraven started out as a Spider-Man villain, like Venom and Morbius. But Sony, which owns the rights, has followed its usual procedure by turning him into a good guy and giving him a screen vehicle of his own – nowadays a standard way of capitalising on an asset, like building hotels in Monopoly.

The refashioned Kraven backstory is a convoluted one, starting in Ghana, where he’s mauled almost to death by a lion, then revived by a magical potion. Twenty years on, he’s morphed into a superpowered cross between Tarzan and Rambo, battling poachers in the wilderness when not hunting down villains further afield.

He also has some issues to work out with his dad, who in all this time has barely aged physically – but has softened in other respects, notably when it comes to his younger son, Dmetri (Fred Hechinger), now a cocktail pianist crooning the hits of Tony Bennett.

Like other Sony productions in the same vein, Kraven the Hunter alternates between entertainingly awful and just bad. Often the intended tone is anyone’s guess: Kraven’s kills are bloodier than average for the genre, but Taylor-Johnson treats the character’s supposed heart of darkness as a bit of a joke, furrowing his brow as if to hint he’s just one more misunderstood man-child (the family dynamics have a hint of Succession).

Elsewhere, Alessandro Nivola has some good moments of low-key comedy as a rival gangster known as the Rhino, a middle-management dork all too visibly thrilled at getting to play in the big leagues. But Crowe remains stranded at the midpoint between credibility and camp, and Ariana DeBose, as Kraven’s under-imagined helper, Calypso, is bad enough to stop the movie in its tracks (it doesn’t help that her scenes tend to be oddly edited, especially a long dialogue on a park bench where we keep reverting to the backs of the actors’ heads).

Through it all, the strongest emotion I felt was concern for the career of director J.C. Chandor, who has some notable achievements to his name, including the 2013 sea story All is Lost, with a tour-de-force performance by Robert Redford as a man battling to survive alone in a leaky boat. Kraven the Hunter is a shipwreck of another kind.

Kraven the Hunter is released in cinemas on December 12.

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