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‘Kraven the Hunter’ Review: Craven? Not Quite, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson Stars in a Marvel Action Movie Where Everything Feels Derivative

Is it the beginning of the endgame for Sony's Spider-Man Universe? With any more movies like this one, yes.

When you build a film around an action star (Jason Statham, say), he’ll do a lot of things that only happen in the movies: lay waste to five goons with his bare hands in two minutes, drive vehicles at dizzying speeds down the ancient staircases of a European metropolis, leap from balconies and hang from the rudders of buzz-diving helicopters. In the film’s grabby opening sequence, he infiltrates a Siberian prison to assassinate a crime lord (which he does the old-fashioned way — by grabbing a tooth out of a saber-tooth-tiger trophy head and stabbing the baddie in the neck). Instead, we’re meant to be caught up in the world of Sergei’s backstory: his heartless gangster father (played, with a thick Russian accent, by Russell Crowe, who still knows how to own a scene), his mother’s suicide, his protective relationship with his soft kid brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger).

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