It’s been a weird year for superheroes at Sony. After the lacklustre debut of the criminally underrated Madame Web, and with no Spider-Men animated or otherwise to lean on, it’s all eyes on fall and winter as the studio brings the final Venom movie to theaters and debuts a new leading anti-hero: longtime Spidey villain Sergei Kravinoff, a.k.a. Kraven the Hunter. If our first extended look at the film was anything to go by, he’s going to be making a bloody landing later this year.
Although we’ve already had a brief glimpse at the violent and messy family drama at play in J. C. Chandor’s upcoming movie in its debut trailer, at New York Comic Con last night, the director and star Aaron Taylor-Johnson debuted the opening scene from the film to try and show audiences what will make the R-Rated superhero movie stand out. Featuring almost entirely subtitled dialogue in Russian, the film opens in a snowy tundra as a lone truck drives along a quiet road. It turns out, as the truck pulls up to a gas station, that it’s a prison van: a soldier gets out the truck, instructing the prisoners to follow for a brief break, Kraven included. As the truck ventures on to a nearby prison colony, we cut inside as Kraven and the other new inmates are lead through to grab their amenities, surrounded by guards and inmates alike rattling bars and railings to intimidate them. Kraven meets his brusque roommate, who tells him in Russian that he hates sharing his room with someone. The feeling’s mutual, Kraven responds, but tells his new “friend” not to worry about sharing—Kraven will only be locked up for three days at most.
Later on, Kraven is bench pressing weights in a training yard, when two other inmates walk up to him and attempt to get him to stop—he’s training in a “private area,” they say, as they both put their body weight down onto the bar and into Kraven’s chest. He’s not worried, however, as he pushes back, lifting the weights back up before he slams them down, gets up, and smashes the two goons’ faces into the bar. “It’s open territory,” Kraven tells them, as we then cut to him being taken to meet their seeming boss: the head of the Kirov Gang. The gangster leads a cushy life behind bars, in a well-furnished office-meets-cell adorned with a leopard skin rug, which becomes very important after the gangster asks Kraven who he is. “I’m a hunter, I hunt men like you,” Kraven growls, only for the gangster to declare the Hunter a myth. Kraven offers his name, crouches down to feel the rug, and yanks one of the teeth out of the Leopard’s mouth to use as a rudimentary dagger, stabbing his way through the Kirov men before finally clambering up on top of the lead gangster’s desk. “There’s always an ounce of truth in myths,” Kraven warns him, before embedding the tooth into his neck, spraying blood with every stab.
From there, it’s chaos: a guard opens the door startled by the bloodshed, only for Kraven to run almost through him, sending him flying as Kraven bounds through the prison, swinging himself over and under railings to get to the rooftops. Spotted by flood lights, the guards give chase, shooting at Kraven to no avail as he clambers and dashes all over the prison like a wild beast. After scaling the walls, Kraven bolts across the snowy tundras surrounding the prison colony and vanishes into the distant blizzards, bringing an end to the sequence.
But that wasn’t all Sony had to show. The studio also debuted a brief glimpse of a scene first glimpsed in Kraven‘s debut trailer, pushing the animalistic brutality of the character even further. Flashing forward further into the movie, the scene sees a group of armed mercenaries prepare to assault Kraven in a dense woodland forest. As merc after merc pull up and get out of cars, we see Kraven in a base of his own, examining wall after wall of knives and swords, selecting his arsenal. Back in the forest, the readying mercenaries are startled after a big cat bounds through their position, only to reveal that Kraven is already among them, hiding in the bushes and stalking his prey.
Immediately, things turn brutal. In quick succession, Kraven picks off the mercenaries one by one in gory fashion: slamming a bear trap over one’s head, carving open another with one of his blades before burying a hatchet in a third’s head. Two of the most gory kills don’t directly involve Kraven at all: one mercenary triggers a trip wire that sends a spiked log flinging into him, crushing him against a tree, while another is caught up in a set of roped bear traps that drag him along the forest floor at high speed into a blade on a nearby tree stump, bifurcating him in a spray of gore.
“When the studio gave us the opportunity to see if we wanted to do this as an R film, we were like, ‘yes!’” Chandor told fans ahead of introducing the footage at NYCC. “It was an amazing opportunity. It sort of opened up some really intense kind of grindhouse stuff on one side, and then some also really intense character stuff.”
The footage certainly showed just how intense Kraven the Hunter is hoping to go in terms of its violence—we’ll have to wait until December 13 to see if it can match that intensity with its character work and bring Sony’s strange superheroic year to an end. Regardless, it’ll certainly be finishing 2024 on a bloody note, to say the least.
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