While it's likely that this marks the final chapter in Sony's Spider-Man Villain cinematic universe, I have to admit that once we got past the overly long and overly "explainy" backstory section (running over 30 minutes!) that is basically just a long flashback and has another actor playing the younger versions of Kraven and his brother, this sort of won me over.

It's a mess, there's no debating that. And even aside from the long flashback setup, there are loads of clumsy dialogue and ADR moments in this that might actually be worse than Madame Web, but I think there are a couple of genuinely fun and slick action scenes and enough to like in the performances of Russell Crowe and some of the bad guys here. This movie is getting eviscerated by critics and fans alike, so I guess I'm in the minority here.

This really puts a lot on the connection between brothers Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), with Sergei aka Kraven the Hunter having left home to escape their overbearing gangster father Nikolai (Russell Crowe). Kraven has been busy killing off poachers and criminals but he finds himself in trouble with one who goes by the nickname the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) and even finds himself hunted by a mysterious hitman known as The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott). Along the way, he enlists the help of a lawyer named Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who also coincidentally helped him survive a lion attack by giving him a mysterious potion she got from her grandmother, which may have given Kraven some superhuman strength... or something.

As stated, it's a mess, and it's messy on-screen. There are so many long stretches of explanation and exposition that it becomes pretty clear this came from a stack of studio notes and attempts to clarify what the hell is happening, and on that level it fails because we end up getting so much lore that it takes away from the story. The connection between the brothers feels real enough, but it's buried under a lot of other side scenes and flashbacks of other characters.

And yet... I have to admit that when it just dispensed with the self-serious world building and just rolled out as a silly action movie, I enjoyed myself. Near the film's midpoint we get a scene of Kraven attempting to chase down a car on foot, and between that and the final fight between Rhino and Kraven set amidst a stampede of wild cattle... it ain't bad.

It ain't very good either, just to be clear, but I think had this just been a mid-budget straight-to-streaming kind of criminal action movie with some wildlife settings and supernatural elements, it may have fared better with people.