I don't know what reaction Sony were hoping to elicit with the first trailer for Kraven the Hunter, but I can tell you what mine was: I laughed and laughed and laughed. The dodgy CGI! Russell Crowe's vaguely Eastern European accent! Aaron-Taylor Johnson's bafflingly flat line delivery! All hilarious. And yet, the film is trying so hard to look like a grown-up action movie, complete with nose-chewing, gruesome man traps, and crossbow deaths, that it slides into camp.
Let's be honest here, this movie is not looking promising and absolutely nobody who has been paying attention to this thing, or who saw Morbius last year, should be at all surprised by that. Sony's ongoing attempts to create a Spider-Man-adjacent cinematic universe have always felt like a slightly desperate folly, and as rumors about the direction the R-rated project is taking have seeped out, so too has a sense that this Kraven has very little to do with his comic book counterpart.
