Kraven The Hunter

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Kraven The Hunter
UK/Iceland/Canada/USA 2024
Directed by J.C. Chandor
Columbia UK Blu Ray

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.

I think the suits in Hollywood are having trouble scratching their heads and wondering why their movie version of Kraven The Hunter failed. Well, pandemic aside, I saw pretty much every Marvel movie at the cinema whether I wanted to or not because I knew I’d really need to get a review of it up on my blog... and even I didn’t manage to catch this movie at the cinema. And the answer to why it failed at the box office is three fold and simple... and I say this because, now I’ve finally caught up to it (authenticity to the characters aside) it’s actually a pretty good movie. 

Okay, this movie failed because: Firstly it was following on from two other Columbia branded Marvel movies in the same year, the not well received Madame Web (reviewed here) and the okay but worst in the series Venom - The Last Dance (reviewed here)... which didn’t do it much favours, they should have maybe left an eight month gap between films. Secondly, the trailers for this thing looked terrible and, I’m pretty sure people my age, who remember the character from the 1960s and 70s, were a little baffled as to how a major villain from The Amazing Spider-Man comic was a) in a movie without Spider-Man and b) being portrayed as some kind of anti-hero rather than the bad guy he always was... and perhaps the comic character changed in the 90s or after but, yeah, this is not the Kraven I know (the Kraven I knew best was from the time when he joined The Sinister Six and also from the model kit I had as a kid, of Spider-Man perched on a wooden bannister, webbing a fallen Kraven on the floor). 

And even then, I would still have been up for catching this thing at the cinema and, I certainly planned to... but it was released mid-December 2024 and, I’m sorry, studio bosses need to realise that in the lead up to Christmas, when people are still buying and wrapping presents, not to mention writing and sending cards... and in the downtime just after when people are seeing friends and family... nope, people are not going to be interested in trying to plan their life around the stupidly inappropriate times these things are being shown at in the cinema. So, yeah, I believe that’s why this film failed and made such a loss for the company. 

Which is a shame because, as I said, it’s not a bad movie.

The film starts off  really strongly with Kraven (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) infiltrating a maximum security prison in order to kill the leader of a drugs/weapons cartel. After escaping we flash back to his childhood, with his brother and his dad (played by Russell Crowe) where we get his origin... which is contentious. In the comics he was just a relatively strong guy who was an expert hunter (which is why J. Jonah Jameson originally hired him to hunt Spider-Man) but, in this version of the story he’s given a potion to heal his wounds while simultaneously having the blood of a lion enter his system... all of which brings him back to life and gives him superhuman powers (oh, right, Marvel science then). Again, maybe this origin was retrofitted into the comics at some point but, if it was, I’m unaware of it. 

And then he becomes a kind of assassin who goes around taking out all the bad guys and, annually, checking in on his brother whom he deserted when they were kids. And then, as a result of him killing the guy at the start of the film, the global gangs are in a power struggle which also includes Kraven’s gang boss dad and results in his brother getting kidnapped.

And... it’s mostly pretty good. I’m saying that again because I’m going to talk about the bad stuff now and I don’t really want it to overshadow the positive stuff.

The thing is, there’s a woman who is Kraven’s pilot and we only see her from behind near the start of the movie and then, later, she’s referenced as she gives his leading lady, Calypso (played by Ariana DeBose) a lift to the jungle to meet up with him. So she’s obviously being kept in the shadows so she can be revealed as somebody important from the Marvel universe later in the movie... but that doesn’t happen. She just vanishes from the movie with no more mention of her (and we never get to see her face properly). So... I know this film had a somewhat troubled production and had to have some reshoots so, I’m wondering now if this big reveal was maybe cut to save for a later, never to be made sequel?

Secondly, the main villain here is The Rhino... another Spider-Man villain in a movie where the web head is nowhere to be seen. Okay, in the comics this was just a big guy in a Rhino onesy and, that would have suited me fine. Here, he’s just someone who can transform himself into a were-rhino when he taps into certain drugs. It all looks pretty awful guys. 

Thirdly... and I saw this coming a mile off because his talent for voice mimicry is highlighted throughout the movie.... Kraven’s brother becomes a third Spider-Man villain, The Chameleon, at the end of the film. And he does it by, in a completely dumbfounding and unexplained fashion, transforming into different people when required. I mean, literally morphing into them at will. What nonsense! In the comics he was a guy with a metal head who would slip realistic, latex masks over his noggin and mimic their voices to become them. Which sounds bad, I know but, heck, Tom Cruise and co have been doing that in nearly every Mission Impossible movie made so, yeah, they could have gotten away with it here too. And also, because it’s obviously planned for a potential sequel (again, this looks like it will never happen) then it’s just treated as a throwaway scene too... it doesn’t really work, in all honesty. 

And that’s me pretty much done with Kraven The Hunter. An actually pretty good film, despite those negatives and, I have to say I had a pretty good time with most of it. If you are a fan of action movies with a fair amount of violence and a little bit of goriness, then it’s worth giving a go. But I don’t think the franchise is going anywhere after this one, alas. 

ISS

ISS Side Up

I.S.S
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
USA 2023 (2024 release)
Universal
UK Theatrical Print

ISS is a new sci-fi thriller set aboard the International Space Station of the title. Starting with the tail end of the journey to and, arrival of, a new American researcher to the ISS, the film has only six cast members in its whole running time and is totally set in... and for a couple of sequences, on... the space station of the title (and the shuttle rocket which gets the inhabitants to and from there).

So we have six cast members playing three a piece of both the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. There’s Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina and John Gallagher Jr. playing the American crew. And we have Masha Mashkova, Costa Ronin and Pilou Asbæk playing their Russian counterparts. And the two crews seem to get along just fine and friendly (in one case, a little more than friendly, in terms of the captain of the American team and the lady of the Russian crew) until something happens.

So the film has a really strong premise and it’s this... one day not long after her arrival on the ISS, Ariana DeBose’s character spots something which she at first thinks is a volcano erupting on the Earth out of the window. She calls the others to float over to the window with her to look but the light show doesn’t just stop at one ’eruption’ and the crew witness a nuclear war from space. Soon after, the crew realise there is no internet and contact with Earth is lost but, the two commanders of each team get secret communications sent to them independently, saying there is now war between America and Russia and that they have to ‘take control’ of the ISS... by any means necessary.

So that’s the set up and it’s a nicely handled, quite intense and dark piece. As people on each side question their superiors’ orders while certain other members of... well... one team especially, tries to eliminate the other team as quick as he can. Like a lot of movies set in isolated locations where the characters are cut off from any kind of real communication with the outside world, there’s a lot of paranoia in the film and, even with such clearly established sides, switching allegiances to some extent... one of the US crew is clearly affected mentally by the objective of his new mission priority and this manifests in an aggressive and dangerous way (aka, he’s a psycho ready to kill American and Russian alike to reach his goal).

Now there’s good and bad with the film. Something I can tell you is it’s a good, more than competently made movie with an almost unbearable amount of suspense in some sequences. It also has good special effects such as the really well done weightlessness of the crew for most of the scenes (though obviously not as good as Jane Fonda’s anti-gravity striptease at the start of Barbarella, for obvious reasons) and nice moments such as, when wounds are inflicted, floating blood droplets in the air.

The cast of six are all great in this. Not one of them puts a foot wrong in this piece and the ‘villains’ are people you will be happy to see die with everyone having good, on screen chemistry. Ditto on the direction and editing. Gabriela Cowperthwaite turns in a nice looking film which has a certain flair and I imagine, giving the weightlessness and other difficulties of shooting stories set in space, this must have been a hard thing to capture... she acquits herself brilliantly.

And the musical score too, by Anne Nikitin, really adds tension to the piece. I would love to listen to this as a stand alone experience but, alas, at time of writing this review there is no proper CD release (just a stupid download). Granted, it’s maybe mixed in too powerfully in a couple of the early scenes but it certainly injects an extra layer of tension throughout the film and I will have to watch out... or listen out, at least... for this lady on future movies.

Okay... it’s a good film, certainly but... not a great film, alas. I’ve been avoiding the floating elephant in the room thus far and it’s this, I think. I'm pretty sure it’s a writing problem. We have such a strong set up and the movie plays out exactly as you might think such a set up would play out but... does nothing more. There’s no last act element to elevate the emotional stakes any higher than they are at the start of the story and, although there is a certain, open ended resolution to the thing (which has, perhaps, shades of other movies where isolated characters are slowly being whittled down), there’s no real feeling of progression to any of the characters or situations by the end of the movie and so it just feels, I dunno, a bit anticlimactic.

But that’s the only problem I had with it and, like I said, ISS is certainly an entertaining movie with harrowing suspense and tension in some scenes and, definitely some clearly defined antagonists on both crews of the station so, if those are the kind of movies you like, you should still have a pretty good time with this one. Just don’t expect too much from the ending, is my main warning on this one.