Recently I caught an old interview Dick Cavett had with Christopher Reeve. During the interview Reeve made an interesting point about how movie studios used to be ran by executives who loved movies and how that transitioned into movies being made by executives who made movies by chasing the audience demographic. Marvel movies walk that tightrope and unless the filmmakers care about the intellectual property they are using they fall off of that line, especially when Marvel was printing these movies like toilet paper. Kraven the Hunter is definitely one that falls off of the line.

I found that Kraven to be slightly infuriating to watch because I felt that the people responsible for the visual effects weren’t given enough time to do their job properly and yes they are artists. Now don’t get me the filmmakers delivered a decent enough story though with the little I knew about the character of Kraven I was a little thrown by his portrayal because I always thought that the character was a villain and not a hero. I wasn’t impressed by Aaron-Taylor Johnson’s performance during the opening sequence in the prison. I briefly mistook ATJ for Tom Hidleston. Russell Crowe gave an interesting performance and his Russian accent kind of reminded me of his character from Alex Kurtzman’s 2017 movie The Mummy. Fred Hechinger gave a decent enough as Dmitri Smerdyakov but his character really didn’t fire on all cylinders until the third act of the movie.