Aaron Taylor-Johnson is one of Hollywood’s It Boys right now as the bookies’ favourite for the next James Bond.
The 34-year-old co-stars in Robert Eggers’ critically acclaimed new horror Nosferatu and the promising trailer for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later came out this week.
Yet you can’t win them all. This week, he stars in the next instalment of Sony’s dreadful non-MCU Spider-Man villain spin-offs, set in another universe without Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.
Despite poor reviews, Tom Hardy’s Venom trilogy was a box office success, but Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web and Jared Leto’s Morbius were critically panned bombs.
And now Kraven the Hunter lands in cinemas this weekend with 15 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and a slamming from the critics.
Daily Telegraph
Last orders can’t come soon enough for the whole parade of supervillains, superheroes, or however they’re now choosing to identify. This is rock bottom.
Empire
Kraven The Hunter is limp, tired, uninvolving superhero fare.
The Independent
Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes.
Den of Geek
The movie is so vacuous, so bereft of life in spite of its many desperate and quality actors trying to quicken the cadaver with wasted energy, that it eerily resembles the cobbled together emptiness of the worst 2000s superhero time-wasters.
Discussing Film
As the last movie in Sony’s Universe of Spider-Man villains, Kraven the Hunter couldn’t have closed things out on a more pathetic note. This isn’t like Madame Web where you can at least laugh at how bad it is. Just a total waste of time.
MovieWeb
The stakes here never seem particularly high and its lack of momentum and its gaps in logic suggest much tinkering to gloss over bigger inadequacies.
Some of the critics were kinder, although barely had anything positive to say about Kraven the Hunter, which Sony released the first 8 minutes of on YouTube.
Variety
I’ve seen much worse comic-book movies than Kraven the Hunter, but maybe the best way to sum up my feelings about the film is to confess that I didn’t stay to see if there was a post-credits teaser.
Guardian
Kraven is a so-so character in a so-so film and the superhero revival is as far away as ever.
Observer
This Spider-Man spin-off is entertaining—the action sequences hold together, blood gushes frequently, and Aaron Taylor Johnson dons a midriff-baring costume. But it’s also convoluted and full of extraneous characters.
Total Film
Had Chandor’s film stayed an old-school mob yarn with a dash of All the Money in the World, it would probably have been a perfectly satisfying throwaway. What undermines it is its rather desperate eagerness to ally itself with the wider Spider-Man canon.
Kraven the Hunter hits cinemas on Friday.