You know that scene in the fourth Indiana Jones movie where Indiana finds himself inside the fake small town in the middle of the desert and realizes all of the families therein are mannequins and the fruit is plastic and it's really just a staged world that the military has set up in order to drop a nuke on? Sometimes I wonder if we sneaked past the security guards and got into the offices of Sony Pictures if it might not be just like that. Nothing but cardboard walls and doors that open onto bricks. Because it boggles the mind that there could actually be human beings behind the decisions they keep making for their superhero movies. They feel like the "monkeys with typewriters" scenario brought to life, or perhaps a league of Coneheads pretending to be Earth people but getting each step just a hair off, one after another, until a smorgasboard of gibberish spills out its ass-end. This is textbook Bad Movie behavior.
But that doesn't mean there's not a good helping of true WTF fun to be had out of Kraven the Hunter anyway. Yes, Sony's latest and opposite-of-greatest stab at the genre somehow manages to make the glory days of Madame Web feel fonder. But none of these actors are to blame. This troupe of thesps know what they're up against and dammit they keep fighting the fight, one camp whisper to another, winding through the marauding CG mayhem. Leading man slash abdominal billboard Aaron Taylor-Johnson is ultimately done in by the movie's frankensteined incoherence, but our boy tries his damndest to yank it together with every one of those big beautiful muscles of his. He does not succeed! But he's having fun most of the time, and he manages to get some of that across whenever the movie lumbers out of his way for a split second.
But best of all -- Alessandro Nivola as the ridiculous baddie is legit great, lifting the movie unto absurdist heaven whenever he appears. (And not for nothing he looks as hot as he's ever looked on-screen, his tight white dress shirt and strappy little backpack doing the lord's work.) Nivola is a real riot, chewing every dumb line of dialogue right up, and when he does this silent scream thing about halfway into the movie it instantaneously paid for my ticket in full. (Well okay I didn't pay for a ticket thankfully, but this moment would have had I.) None of this is enough to save the movie from itself, but I wasn't angry when I left the theater. Just deeply suspicious about those Sony offices filled with outer space mannequins, is all...
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