Kraven The Hunter (2024)

Now that I have FINALLY got into reading some of the many comics that have proven to be such fertile ground for Hollywood, I tend to know a number of the characters I would have never even heard of years ago. Which explains why I ended up looking forward to Kraven The Hunter, another of the Sony movies making use of a Spider-Man character without having Spider-Man actually in the movie. I have read the earliest comics to feature Kraven The Hunter, and I thought that he was an entertaining character who could be placed in a fun movie. Of course, that opinion was affected by knowing that he was to be played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (I'm not really a fan), but I still decided that I would try to have some fun.

The plot is tosh, a mess of a script written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (all the more disappointing because of how much I love some of Richard Wenk's directorial work), but it essentially gives us the origin story of the title character, someone who uses his powerful animalistic skillset to hunt poachers and villains. Once he sets his sights on someone, that person is as good as dead, and the highlight of this film is the determination and savagery with which Kraven despatches those who end up on his bad side.

Director J. C. Chandor isn't used to working with this kind of material, but he does a decent enough job with some of the action moments. Maybe I'm just worn down from the bad stuff that we've seen from Sony over the past few years, but this never seemed as bad as anything else they've given us. The CGI is uneven, but not completely awful, and Kraven feels as if he has proper teeth and claws. There just isn't enough here to distract people from a fairly wea script, and a large part of that is to do with the eminently forgettable villains (there are at least three, but only one works, and that's Russell Crowe, enjoyably hamming things up with another accent in the role of Aleksei Sistevich, the father of our "hero").

Taylor-Johnson is okay in the role, trying to maintain a serious face in the middle of some ridiculous moments, but there's always someone better available for pretty much every role he gets. Someone with a bit more charisma, and maybe someone better able to convey humour, would have been welcome, although I'm not sure I could give any specific examples. As I've just said, Crowe is fun, but that's all the praise I can offer. Poor Ariana DeBose tries hard in a thankless role, as a woman named Calypso who ends up helping Kraven more than once, Fred Hechinger barely registers as Dmitri (Kraven's brother), and both Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott play the other two main villains, forgettable as soon as they're offscreen).

This isn't great, but it's polished and entertaining in a way that the previous film in this flop-tastic movie series wasn't. I didn't have a terrible time, and the fact that this ended up taking even less at the box office than either Morbious or Madame Web feels slightly unfair. It's certainly not anywhere close to being as bad as the latter. I wish some better decisions had been made, but I also know that I could easily sit down and rewatch this without feeling the overwhelming urge to rip off my own head. How's that for a ringing endorsement?

6/10

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Prime Time: The Eye (2008)

Although not from Japan, The Eye (2002) was one of many horror movies to be lumped in with the hits that were coming thick and fast in the J-horror boom at the start of the 21st century. It holds up as a superb horror movie, and it's a shame that the makers of it, the Pang brothers, didn't do anything else that came close to it.

The remake was probably inevitable, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept, especially with so many things wrong.

Jessica Alba stars as Sydney Wells, which is the first major error (more on that later). Sydney is a talented violinist, and she's blind. After undergoing a cornea transplant, Sidney has to get used to seeing the world around her, but it takes her a while to realise that she's not seeing the world the way that everyone else sees it. Much like a young Haley Joel Osment, she sees dead people. She sees so many of them, at times, that it's almost as if she's receiving an important message.

Okay, I may as well address my first complaint right here. I don't hate Jessica Alba, and I've enjoyed her in a number of roles, but she's not always the best choice for some of the lead roles that she's been given over the years, and I think her inclusion here just feels wrong. She's not convincing, whether playing the violin or reacting to the environment around her. Sadly, the rest of the cast don't do much better, which is more surprising when it comes to the likes of Alessandro Nivola (playing Dr. Paul Faulkner), Parker Posey (playing Sydney's sister, Helen), and Chloë Grace Moretz (playing a young hospital patient named Alicia).

The cast aren't helped by either the script, by Sebastian Gutierrez, or the direction, from David Moreau and Xavier Palud. None of these people manage to stick close to the atmosphere and style of the original, despite sometimes trying, which is a massive disappointment for those familiar with the 2002 film. Those seeing this story being told onscreen for the first time might be a bit easier to please, but even the most casual horror fan may start to feel that something is lacking. You get a number of jump scares, a load of messy CGI, and a third act that takes things in a direction that was not only done better the first time around, it was also done better in another fantastic 2002 horror movie (that I won't name, in order to avoid spoiling things for anyone).

It would be easy to go on and on about more of the things in this remake that irk me so much, and I do like a rant every now and again, but it's not really worth the time or energy. The Eye is simply a typical example of the laziest kind of remake. It's the kind of film we can all point to as an argument against remakes, despite the fact that there have been (thankfully) a number of modern remakes that have managed to get things very right.

3/10

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You Were Never Really Here (2017)

There are a lot of familiar elements in You Were Never Really Here and if I simply listed them without further explanation then you could be forgiven for thinking that this was just another retread of overheated tropes and cliches. Its a film about a man you pay to get jobs done without needing the police. There's a little girl needing saved, although she may be a lot tougher and smarter than she looks. There's betrayal. And, of course, a job goes horribly wrong. Thankfully, there's a lot more to this film than just those elements. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay, adapating a novella by Jonathan Ames, uses this storyline to explore the psychology of the main character and to show the drip drip drip of the violence and bloodshed eroding his core. But is it his mind going? His heart and soul? His humanity? Or is it possible to repair the damage?

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a man who spends a lot of his time rescuing snatched children, not averse to also killing people in his way with whatever he thinks will do the job best (like a hammer, for example). He also cares for his mother (Judith Roberts). When he's asked to track down the missing daughter of a politician, he goes about things in his usual, effective manner. All seems to go well . . . until it doesn't. As he realises what he's gotten himself into, Joe becomes more and more determined to rescue the young girl (played by Ekaterina Samsonov). That's not going to end well for the criminals, but it might not end well for Joe either.

I enjoyed You Were Never Really Here while it was on. Ramsay intercuts the main narrative with a number of sequences showing fragments of flashbacks and dreams that continue to upset Joe, showing that he's a man who may never find peace. Yet she also delivers in the standard scenes of vengeance/vigilante justice. The violence is depicted in a messy and brutal way, making it all the more effective as viewers can realise what Joe goes through with every life he takes. Physical struggles that take their toll, sharp things puncturing soft tissue, blood and sweat and, yes, a few tears. It's always brief, often only the after-effects are shown, but the film remains steeped in it for much of the runtime.

The choices made by Ramsay are interesting, mainly because of how she still presents viewers with touchstones from these kinds of movies while also using every action and interaction to delve deeper into the mind of Joe, but it helps her cause immensely that she has Phoenix in the main role. He's an actor often able to give great performances and this ranks up there with one of his very best. By turns scary, vulnerable, confident, suicidal, caring, and cold-hearted, there may be other people who turn up onscreen but I can't recall many of them. Roberts and Samsonov are the others who stand out, not because of other characters being underwritten or expendable but because of how strongly they impact on the life of Joe, and therefore affect his mindset for the majority of the movie.

There's something stopping me from rating this as a perfect film just now, which isn't to say that it won't happen when I revisit it some time in the future. Everything works so beautifully, bookended by acts of violence that shock in different ways. You also get a strange and wonderful Jonny Greenwood score as the icing on the cake.

If you're a fan of Ramsay or Phoenix (and why wouldn't you be?) then you owe it to yourself to see this film. I may even come back to this review soon to round up my rating.

9/10

Buy the blu here.
Americans will be able to get it here.