I can’t believe we’re here again. After not one, not two, but three Venom movies, and the dumpster fires known as Morbius and Madame Web, Sony’s final(?) non-Spider-Man Spider-Man Marvel movie has finally been released. And I was willing to give Kraven the Hunter the benefit of the doubt for a number of reasons prior to sitting down in a theater. JC Chandor, director of actual good films like Margin Call and A Most Violent Year, directed this film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an actor I’ve always liked, was the lead, and he’s bulked up and has fully gone through the Marvel Machine. And plus we have other people I enjoy like Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger and Christopher Abbott. We have Russell Crowe doing a funny accent! How could this go wrong? 

(spoiler alert – it did)

Teenage brothers Sergei and Dmitri are told their mother has just taken her own life. Their father Nikolai (Crowe) tells them how she was weak and didn’t have the fight in her that they must find within themselves. He takes them on a hunting expedition to make men out of them. Sergei is mortally wounded but somehow gets the blood of a lion in one of his wounds, and a young girl named Calypso gives him a mystery potion that brings him back to life. Cut to 16 years later, and Sergei (Taylor-Johnson) is living the life of a protector and a vigilante who lives in the woods. Bad guys come into the picture and Sergei must become Kraven the Hunter.

This is really dumb. I have no idea how all of these Sony/Marvel movies are all so poorly made, considering they are all made by and starring people who should know better. No one actor comes out of this thing unscathed, because everyone appears to be in a different movie. Some are taking this deathly seriously while others are poking fun at the inherent campiness of It all. These films all include laughable dialogue, poor editing and incomprehensibly bad ADR. And yet I go into every movie – even one like this – with optimism, because I’m always hoping a movie will prove me wrong. They don’t always succeed in doing so.

We’re still at a place with Aaron Taylor-Johnson where I have no idea if he’s a good actor or not. He’s got such a presence and he’s got the classic movie star look about him to such an extent that I’m kind of blinded by the physicality and the swaggering charm that seems to be there in all of his performances. He has yet to have a successful film that really catches on, and it ain’t gonna be this one, but I do admire his level of commitment here. When I say ‘he’s gone through the Marvel Machine’, what I mean is if you have seen what these actors do to destroy their bodies to get them to what they look like in these movies, it looks absolutely agonizing. It has to be bad for an actor’s mental health and their physical heath. Zac Efron once spoke about what he did to get in shape for a movie and it sounded grueling and dehumanizing. The fact that Taylor-Johnson went to these lengths and the resulting movie was this? It’s just depressing.

Ariana DeBose seems to be stuck in that space where after an Oscar win, a talented younger actress seems to be struggling to book anything worthy of her. I have no idea why she’s here and neither does she. I want better things for her, I’ve been a fan of hers since her Broadway days, but she needs to either hire a new agent or work with filmmakers more likely to get something good out of her, because this was a waste of her time. Fred Hechinger, a very promising younger actor who is coming off a very interesting year that included two very different performances in Thelma and Gladiator II, is similarly wasted here as well.

Russell Crowe seems to be going back and forth between some wildly differing accents. And while it seems like he’s having fun with the stupidity of this, it kind of felt reminiscent of the once great actor embarrassing himself in his later career, and Crowe has been doing this since 2012’s Les Miserables. We also have Christopher Abbott playing a very funny (not on purpose) villain, and Alessandro Nivola as a similarly ridiculous bad guy. In case you’re keeping score, there is one woman in this movie who has a name and speaking lines. So, that’s what we’re dealing with here.

I left the theater after Kraven the Hunter scratching my head but still not being all that surprised. This is baffling, inept, borderline incoherent stuff. I was confounded by all of these names – these are all people who should know better than to get involved in this kind of thing. And director JC Chandor spent at least two years of his life making this when he could have been making something – anything else. Something more along the lines of the films that put him on the map in the first place.

Kraven the Hunter was also delayed on the release schedule a bunch of times, which suggests a troubled production that may have included reshoots, script rewrites, and a number of contributing factors that led to the dumpster fire now playing at your local multiplex. If you’re like me, and a movie this bad is like catnip to you, go see it and you’ll find plenty to laugh at. But if you’re a moviegoer discerning enough to care about your time and how you spend your money at the cinema, I do not know why you’d go to a movie theater and buy a ticket for Kraven the Hunter.