Monday new releases: 16 December 2024

Kraven the Hunter, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim and Evil Does Not Exist are in cinemas, Fly Me to the Moon is on Apple TV+ and Carry-On is on Netflix

Apologies for the late delivery of today’s update. I was just about to go to sleep last night when I realised that I hadn’t seen Kraven the Hunter this weekend and that would leave an intolerable gap in my coverage.

It’s hard to imagine that there could be a film so conceptually unmemorable that I forget about it entirely, but here we are. Making the trip out to the multiplex has put a dent in my day but at least I can say I’ve seen it.

Is it the worst film of 2024? Hardly. It has turns by some of my favourite character actors – Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott – all due a comic book pay cheque and all given freedom to snarl after their own fashion. Even a younger actor with character potential (Fred Hechinger from Thelma and Gladiator II) has some moments.

The problems are at conception. Why does this film need to exist and why does it need to star Aaron Taylor-Johnson? The other day, when Emile Donovan and I were talking about ‘what makes a movie star’, I found myself thinking about Taylor-Johnson and how he keeps getting these lead roles despite the fact that most audiences would have trouble picking him out of a police lineup.

He’s a decent actor – and has clearly done the gym work here – but he has never had the kind of likeability that allows him to carry a film by himself. He’s no Channing Tatum*, am I right? And Kraven the Hunter is a comic book movie at the grimmer end of the scale to begin with.

Crowe plays Nikolai Kravinoff, a gangster oligarch. He lives in an English country house. Nivola plays Aleksei Systevich, an oligarch gangster. You can tell he’s an oligarch first because outside his office windows are the industrial landscape of smokestacks and chimneys.

Kravinoff is a bully who had driven his wife into madness and is attempting through sheer thuggery to turn his two sensitive sons into the kind of man he already is. Strength is on everybody’s mind in this film, often confusing physical strength with strength of character.

After being mauled by a lion he could not shoot, Sergei (the older boy), is revived by a magic potion that gives him the power of that lion, the potion administered by another teenager named Calypso. 16 years later, Sergei (now played by the buff Mr. Taylor-Johnson) has left the family – and his brother (Mr. Hechinger) to bear the brutality of their father alone – to become a source of extra-judicial vengeance upon men like his father, although crucially not his father himself.