Kraven the Hunter Parent Guide

The Siberian landscape is bleak, and a group of prisoners are being transported across it to a hopeless end. Shortly after arrival at the prison, one of the convicts kills a crime kingpin and manages to escape from a seemingly unbreakable fortress. He does so by scaling walls and dodging bullets with abilities that are undeniably superhuman, and that’s putting it very mildly.

It turns out the man posing as Prisoner 0864 is actually Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), scion of Russian drug lord Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), who has mostly grown up in the United States. His extraordinary abilities—including the ability to connect spiritually with animals—are explained in a back story that includes an African hunting safari with his dad and the magical intervention of Calypso Ezili (Diaana Babnicova, played as an adult by Ariana DeBose), a teen girl who has picked up some ancient wisdom and potions from her African grandmother. The upshot is that Sergei—who prefers to be called Kraven—gains qualities of a lion that make him the world’s greatest hunter. And the prey he seeks is men.

Young Sergei (Levi Miller) escapes the tyrannical machismo of his father and devotes his life to hunting and destroying men who are much like Nikolai. The rest of the story consists of a more-or-less constant string of murders, complicated by the kidnapping of Sergei’s younger brother Nikolai (Fred Hechinger/Billy Barratt), whose perfect mimicry skills appear to be setting up the next picture in the series. The violence culminates in difficult showdowns with enemies that have also acquired superpowers - The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).

Kraven’s killings have a Robin Hood quality because he targets bad guys such as poachers and crime bosses, but moral ambiguity enters the plotline early and increases over time. We want to like Kraven. We want to see him destroy evil. But we can’t deny he has some of that evil in him, a point that comes into sharper focus near the story’s end.

Russell Crowe skillfully portrays the drug lord as aa paragon of toxic masculinity, and both Nivola and Abbott manage to come across as complicated, interesting, and not-too cartoonish villains. Taylor-Johnson isn’t likely to receive any Best Actor nominations, but he pulls off the role of Kraven decently and is blessed with looks and charisma.

Special effects in this movie are impressive and are devoted to unusual elements such as attacking lions and stampeding buffalo. Kraven has action-movie tropes, of course - cue bad guys in caravans of black vehicles and conveniently poor marksmanship by machine gunners. The production’s bloody violence renders it completely unsuited to teen viewers, but this film can be watchable for adult action movie fans with a high tolerance for violence. Kraven the Hunter doesn’t reach the sheer grossness level of a gore/slasher film, but it does feature gems like men getting stabbed in the neck and having a nose bitten off. If you decide to go, be ready for some really brutal deaths and a hero with strong anti-hero qualities.