1 out of 5

Remember in “Back to the Future”, when Marty is auditioning for the Battle of the Bands and Huey Lewis tells him he’s “too darn loud?” So quiet & subdued 80% of “Kraven The Hunter” was, that I could clearly hear the shakey leg of the phobic teenager sitting in the row behind me with their 10-person family entourage. They wanted to be anywhere else, too.

Let’s draw the same comparisons every other review is: between this & Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins”. While their narrative direction differs, Batman’s opening salvo is tightly edited, dynamically paced, and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack effectively ‘mickey-mouses’ every scene.

After Kraven’s prologue (freely-available to view on YouTube), there’s a twenty-minute passage with no music, no action, and non-stop dialogue. Aaron Taylor-Johnson eventually bites someone’s cheek off in a fountain of CGI gore, but it segues to another long section with tedious exposition, and Aaron’s incessant fourth-wall mugging.

Legacy director Quentin Tarantino says there are no more movie stars in modern Hollywood, and Aaron is a good thesis. He’s handsome, charismatic, and clearly committed to the role (physically-speaking), but the self-awareness of his line readings betrays the serious tone of the rest of the picture – particularly in Russell Crowe & Alessandro Nivola’s sobering villains. A dozen buffalo are graphically killed by poachers, but all Aaron has for them are poster quips.

Kraven betrays its audience in more overt ways than merely contemptuous acting & a lack of trust. Poor pacing may be covered-up in post-production, but bad timing is entirely a director’s fault, and J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year”) has no clue how to stage action for the mainstream. At one point, a phase-shifting antagonist appears behind someone to shoot them, but when we cut to the reveal, it’s a full beat before the trigger is pulled. Why wait so long? Why is a ten-second throwaway bar shootout halfway through framed clearer than a climactic scene in a monastery? Why is a CGI cutaway of Aaron jumping out a thirty-floor window the most exciting single sequence?

Kraven’s two hours are only passingly engaging, no one looks like they’re having a good time except Aaron (and at the viewer’s expense), and Chandor is more concerned with pretentious drama than Christmas entertainment for the masses. I wanted to like it, but Kraven is lifeless, and not loud enough.