‘Kraven the Hunter’ or — Psychotic Terry Nutkins Induces Ennui?

‘Kraven the Hunter’ (2024) is about a man called Kraven with a deep affinity for animals and who hunts and brutally kills people whilst possessing a penchant for duffle coats sporting oversized furry collars. Essentially, he’s a bloodthirsty Johnny Morris with the fashion sense of a 1980’s British TV football pundit.

When Kraven was a teenager he was infected with the blood of a lion, something which, as anyone who paid attention in biology at school knows, automatically gives him all the powers of a lion — telescopic vision, the ability to climb glass skyscrapers, the capacity to survive direct hits from high explosives. You know, all those powers everyone typically associates with lions whenever we see one.

Kraven likes to protect animals and make sure no harm comes to them which is highly admirable although, quite frankly, I’d have preferred it if he’d had the welfare of the audience in mind instead because, to put it bluntly, we were suffering like a row of abused battery hens sitting through this.

One day Kraven’s brother is kidnapped which gives Kraven the excuse to start LARP-ing one of Ubisoft’s ‘Far Cry’ games and we do nothing more than sit back and watch him do this for two hours. And that’s all there really is to say about ‘Kraven the Hunter’ other than it’s like watching ‘The Really Wild Show’ if Michaela Strachan suddenly went on a killing spree and started slaughtering the studio audience.

Are there any positives? Absolutely not, although it does possess a refreshing lack of overbearing pretension and isn’t saddled with any of the self-satisfying smugness that can make many other recent superhero movies so insufferably grating, but that’s no where near enough to come close to redeeming it.

Yet the film’s biggest problem is the pacing which is so soul-crushingly dull you can feel anhedonia gradually kicking in along with the fear that you might be left permanently incapable of enjoying cinema ever again. In that sense the movie is genuinely terrifying.

All in all I wouldn’t recommend ‘Kraven the Hunter’ to anybody, although if you’ve ever wondered what watching an extremely violent episode of ‘Animal Magic’ would be like whilst simultaneously suffering from a bout of debilitating clinical depression then this film is the answer to that particularly unthinkable question.