2024, JC Chandor (Triple Frontier) -- download
I think I can say I actually liked it. I mean, after admittedly downloading and watching a lot of "dumb action movies", this one came along surprisingly as ... not as dumb?
Why don't you ever commit ? Either you liked it or you didn't.
It opens with an action-thriller rote-opener, the setup, exciting and tense. Russia, winter, cold, lots of big tattooed Bad Guys in transit to a prison, probably a gulag. Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Godzilla) is put into a cell with a monster (of a man) but defuses the fraught introduction, telling him he will be gone in three days. Next morning, after standing up to other big tattooed bullies on the playground, Kraven is escorted to the Big Bad Guy who runs the jail. Big mistake -- that was why Kraven was there, and he kills the Big Bad Guy with a tooth from a tiger rug. His escape is all enhanced super strength and parkour and a signature animalistic slide on his toes and finger tips. When wolves on the tundra challenge him, he growls at them, and they back off. Kraven exits the scene in a waiting plane; job well done.
Its a default way of setting the main character up but its a solid piece, unless you quibble with the CGI depicting Kraven.
The movie then switches to Back Story -- Sergei Kravinoff, his half-brother Dimitri and their king of toxic masculinity father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe, The Mummy), on a hunt in Ghana. Blah blah blah, boys must become men, blah blah, insult some random background character, blah blah blah brothers protect brothers. Despite my quipping, nothing bothered me about this segment. Sure, Russell Crowe is chewing up each line he gives with a terrible accent, but its a typical Russell Crowe King Bad Guy bad accent, and there are no utterly dumbass utterances like Madam Web's, "...he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died." Then Sergei almost dies, chomped by a man-eating lion when a young girl brings him back from zero hit points with a magic potion. Ohhh, so his enhanced powers are.... magic? Didn't expect that. Anywayz, newly feeling-more-than-just-alive Sergei rejects his father and runs off to hide in the wilds of Northern Russia, a place his late mother loved, leaving his brother behind.
Years later. Kraven is The Hunter, or so he tells everyone, and everyone mentions constantly. He's a mysterious figure who... hunts people? They never really explain the why but you get the idea he hunts down Bad Guys for Money. Or for justice. Kraven is a ... superhero? As I understand it, these non-Marvel Marvel movies were supposed to be setting up an anti-hero or downright villain team-up, including The Vulture, Morbius, Venom and now Kraven, for some sort of Spider-Man related inevitability, that would also involve Madam Web? I mean, that's dead now, making this a sort of stand-alone end of an "era" movie, but isn't making Kraven the Hunter a ... hero (i.e. a NC17 rating hero) gonna piss off someone? I doubt they care. But not sure how it would have fit into the planned continuity.
Anywayz...
Kraven still connects with his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger, Gladiator II), always on his birthday. Dimitri is now all grown up, and still under his father's thumb, despite not becoming a villainous right-hand like his brother was expected to be. He runs a night club where he can mimic any other performer. Its a ... life? Anywayz, that night Dimitri is kidnapped. You see, the Russian mobster that Kraven killed in the gulag left a vacuum in the Mob Boss world, and "random background character" is now trying to fill that void. Yes, he's now a crime boss himself. They take Dimitri and attempt to extort money from Daddy Kravinoff but he's not having it -- strong men don't get themselves kidnapped -- so Kraven has to go find his brother. He gets help from Calypso (Ariana DeBose, Argylle), the girl who gave him the potion, who is now a top lawyer in London.
But we know its all a ploy to capture Kraven. Random Background Character, one Aleksei Sytsevich, sends his own enhanced Bad Guy, The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, Poor Things), who has weird hypnosis powers. Kraven tracks hsi brother to a mountainside monastery in Turkey, but that's a ploy -- his brother is really back in London, we its revealed that Sytsevich is The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola, Amsterdam), chemically altered but having to suppress his rhino-thick hide via a fanny-pack slash colostomy bag of chemicals. He was weak in the flashback, and now he is strong, but it came with a cost. And really, just wants Kraven out of the way so he can take over all the crime boss territory, including Daddy Kravinoff. They do not capture Kraven.
This all leads to a final confrontation in Kraven's Russian nature reserve, the place his mother left him. The Foreigner's icky hypnosis trick doesn't protect him from an arrow through the eye, by completely wasted character Calypso, the girl with the magic potion, but we do get a brief glimpse of a poisoned Kraven being afraid of spiders (#groan). But the real deal of this finale is to see The Rhino pull out the chemical blocker and go Full Rhino, gnarly hide, super strength and even a HORN !! Kraven fights off him and his goons via a help from buffalo (not bison) in a rather decent CGI fight.
OK, maybe in writing this back to myself, I don't like the movie as much? No, its not that. I can recognize all the faults, the many faults, of the movie, but the experience was fine enough. I enjoyed what I was watching, I liked the performances. I even liked The Rhino's weird silent hissings of impotent rage. I did not notice how much of Calypso was ADR'd while watching the movie --- so much of her dialogue comes while we are looking at the back of her head. I liked the character they created, much more than the ultra-big-game-hunter comic book character (has he changed in the comics?) and I thought the superhero setup battles.
Was it a good movie? No, but we got along well enough.
You are still terrible at writing about things you enjoyed.
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