Kraven The Hunter (Blu-ray Review)
Kraven The Hunter is the latest of Sony’s Marvel output. A standalone story, the film came out just before Christmas and landed with a thud at the box office. Now not even three months after its slip in theaters, the film is debuting on Blu-ray and 4K. So how does it really fare? Does Aaron Taylor-Johnson have the heart of a lion to defeat the nasty poachers of the world? Find out inside the review. You’ll no doubt read about some Russell Crowe scene chewing too!
Film
AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai Kravinoff (RUSSELL CROWE), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
Before he was Kraven, he was Sergei. As the son of Nikolai, a ruthless gangster, Sergei and his brother Dmitri are used to being treated strangely. The brothers’ mother killed herself and is described by Nikolai as “weak”. There is a very long extended flashback of the brothers and Nikolai on safari in Ghana hunting game. One of the animals they’re hunting is a lion. When Dmitri seizes up trying to shoot the lion, Sergei tries himself. He shoots the lion, but this just makes the lion mad, and he charges at and mauls Sergei.
Before he can finish the job, the lion is scared away by a young girl named Calypso who is with her parents on visiting family. Calypso places a serum in a wound that has already gotten lion’s blood inside of it. She also leaves a tarot card behind. As he heals in the hospital, Sergei is scolded by Nikolai and upon returning home, he is gifted the head of the lion that mauled him. With the blood of said lion inside of him, Sergei becomes enraged and runs away.
Sergei ends up at an animal sanctuary once run by his mother in Russia. There he begins to harness abilities. He can run incredibly fast, climb effortlessly, is hard to injure and has stamina like never before. Flash forward 15 years, and Sergei is now Kraven, a vigilante hunting criminals. While in London to visit Dmitri for his birthday, Kraven is tracked. Mercenaries abduct Dmitri in connection with Kraven’s killing of a trafficker in a Russian prison. Looking for an ally, Kraven finds Calypso (Ariana DeBose), now a lawyer and voodoo priestess.
As Kraven and Calypso search for answers bodies begin to pile up. Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) a criminal who was experimented on and is also known as Rhino, is behind the killings along with The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), his hired assassin. Rhino is something of an associate of Nicolai’s and has let Rhino know who Kraven is. Kraven begins to figure some of the twists out just in time to stop the baddies… but not before some shocking revelations are made.
Yes… You definitely read all of that right. It all does sound ridiculous. And absolutely – The movie is indeed very stupid. Kraven The Hunter may not be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, not even recently, but it is indeed yet another reason why Marvel should not be licensing things to other studios, and why they should possibly think of taking a break from making any movies period, so they can think of new ideas for their characters.
The best moments from this film are all in the trailer. Sadly, Aaron Taylor-Johnson has committed himself to the role of Kraven. He is actually quite good here in spite of the film he’s starring in. Those around him though are not. Ariana DeBose plays as if she’s in another film. Alessandro Nivola played a better villain in Face/Off, and Russell Crowe is carving a niche out for himself with every heavily accented role he plays. I want that man to get into a gym and find something that does more than give him a paycheck. He’s an excellent actor that can do better than this. He gave us a glimpse in The Pope’s Exorcist.
I don’t want to go on too much further about Kraven The Hunter but to say that it feels like a huge misfire. Between the generic staging and filming style, to the cartoon like CGI… It’s as if nobody cared and just wanted to get it out there and move on. Again, save for Aaron Taylor-Johnson, there’s not much worth watching here. Unfortunately, the film is made in such a way that there are holes left wide open for possible franchise options that we know will certainly never happen. That for sure leaves us with a film that is incomplete and not worth the time it takes to get through it.
Video
Encoding: MPEG-4/AVC
Resolution: HD (1080p)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Layers: BD-50
HDR: N/A
Clarity/Detail: Kraven The Hunter’s 1080p presentation is standard. Sometimes there is a blocky look to things with dimensionality looking less than stellar. Contrast is also a tad murky. These are not constants mind you, but annoying considering the film is new and filmed digitally. When things are more spot-on, they look great. As it stands overall, the transfer is imperfect for this Blu-ray.
Depth: Sharpness is not the name of this game either. While the overall look of the film is just fine for the format, for a modern film things don’t always have the same depth you’d expect. Definition in these specific scenes make them look soft, and the loss of texture makes the depth of the film look lesser overall.
Black Levels: Black levels are handled as well as they can be, with a few moments of crush when darkness becomes a little too dark for the format to handle.
Color Reproduction: Colors are often bright and vibrant in daytime or well-lit scenes. Darker scenes look good as well with nothing looking off thankfully.
Flesh Tones: Flesh tones are fine for the most part, with some shoddy CGI marring them from being perfect.
Noise/Artifacts: Clean.
Audio
Audio Format(s): English DTS HD-MA 5.1, Spanish, English Audio Description, French 5.1 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish, French
Dynamics: Dynamically, to my ears anyway, this mix sounds like a fold-down from an Atmos mix. Nothing wrong with that, as this is still a modern sounding mix, with plenty going on and nothing to complain about except maybe that the Atmos track could’ve been on the Blu-ray.
Low-Frequency Extension: Lion attacks, chases, fight scenes, and the standard action of your typical Marvel film make for plenty of work for your subwoofer to do.
Height: N/A
Surround Sound Presentation: Sound effects for action sequences are heard here as well as music, outdoor ambience, and echoes in large spaces.
Dialogue Reproduction: Dialogue is nice a clean too.
Extras
Extras for Kraven The Hunter total a little less than 30 minutes of your time, and they feel like it. They’re fine, but the movie like I said is just not great, so learning more about it won’t improve my feelings about it.
Bonus Features:
Deleted & Extended Scenes
Becoming Kraven
Beast Mode: The Stunts of the Hunt
Outtakes & Bloopers
Kraven’s First Hunt: The Direction
Allies & Antagonists: The Killer Cast
Summary
Kraven The Hunter is yet another misfire in Sony’s Marvel canon. Seeing this trailer in theaters made me want to see this one and seeing it at home for this review left me disappointed. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is committed to the role and deserves a better movie to play Kraven in. Besides that, the movie needed to be started over. Technical merits for this film only make me wonder if the 4K UHD Blu-ray version is any better, but I don’t know if I’d want to sit through it again if I’m being completely honest.
Buy Kraven The Hunter On Blu-ray HERE
Adam Toroni-Byrne
Adam is a lifelong physical media collector. His love of collecting began with a My First Sony radio and his parent's cassette collection. Since the age of 3, Adam has collected music on vinyl, tape and CD and films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray. Adam likes to think of himself as the queer voice of Whysoblu. Outside of his work as a writer at Whysoblu, Adam teaches preschool and trains to be a boxer although admittedly, he's not very good.
