Kraven the Hunter

There are no trophies to be had in this aggressively dumb spinoff from the Marvel superhero world, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson cavorting like a runway model with a fur fetish.

Goll-EE what a misfire.

I admit I had really been looking forward to “Kraven the Hunter,” even when its release date was pushed back a full year. Kraven was a fairly ridiculous minor villain in the Marvel comics world, mostly fighting Spider-Man, but was retconned into a grim antihero type. Released under the Sony banner, the movie looked to be a bloody, hard-R reprieve from the latest MCU antics.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars, and rather than dig deep into finding the lost soul of this character, he seems to have taken the route of stomach crunches and Ozempric to sculpt his frame into the standard-issue angry, lean look that’s all the rage. Ever since Brando rocked a tight white T, actors have been trading in Stanislavski for six-packs.

Taylor-Johnson struts around like a runway fashionista with a fur fetish, his longish black locks tousled just so, trying to achieve a feral “this just happened” halo when you know a team of stylists spritzed and zhuzhed it for hours with tubfuls of product.

Forget superhero; this Kraven aspires to be a supermodel.

The screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway is a weird pastiche of action scenes where Kraven stabs people with lion teeth, bison horns or whatever materials are at hand, mixed up with tense dialogue confrontations with various adversaries — especially his father, Nikolai, a nasty Russian mobster played with full-on “moose und sqvirrel” accent by Russell Crowe.

Big bad daddy is a world-class hunter, obsessed with nailing an African lion dubbed Czar who’s supposedly responsible for killing masses of humans, or as Nikolai puts it, “too tousand, mebbe tree tousand men.” He wants his two teen sons to follow in his manly footsteps, but younger kid Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is kind of a wallflower wimp, while older son Sergei gets chewed up pretty thoroughly in a tangle with Czar.

Luckily, young lass Calypso is nearby with the magic potion her grandmother brewed up, which can heal all wounds “beyond dreaming.” This concoction, mixed in with a little of Czar’s noble blood, gives Sergei animal-like powers — fast as a cheetah, strong as a lion, eyes of an eagle, etc. He can even commune with animals and direct them to some extent.

Flash forward 16 years, and now dubbing himself Kraven, Sergei has become known as “The Hunter” for his brutal assassinations of criminal underworld figures all over the globe. Despite living in a geodesic dome terrarium in Siberia, he somehow has the means to fly anywhere he wants and infiltrate any security defenses.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time before this will bring him back into conflict with his father, with brother Dmitri as the pawn.

He gets help from Calypso, now grown into the form of Ariana DeBose, and I guess this is what an Oscar buys you these days: third billing in a downmarket superhero flick where you play — and I wish I were making this up — a powerful corporate lawyer who’s also an amazing investigator, deadeye archer and voodoo priestess.

I’d love to see her format all that into a resume.

She and Kraven have an on-again, off-again sort of partnership-slash-flirtation. But more of the focus is on Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), a rival of Kraven’s father who hatches an elaborate plot to come after him before Kraven can get to him, since he’s on this mysterious list of bad guys he’s offing.

Rhino lives up to his name, with a penchant for his skin turning all gray and rough unless his body is continually pumped with a special drug cocktail fed from his backback, which along with his glasses and nerdy laugh render him as the world’s baddest tech bro.

It’s an old trick in superhero movies that when you don’t really have a compelling villain to make up for what you lack in quality with quantity. So thus a mysterious hitman known simply as the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), whose superpower is that if you look into his dreamy eyes, you go all moony for a few seconds while he sneaks up behind you and does stabby-stabby things.

Director J.C. Chandor had a nice start to his career with serious dramas like “All Is Lost,” “Margin Call” and “A Most Violent Year,” but apparently was lured by that sweet, sweet superhero siren call. His action scenes are staged decently enough, with Kraven hopping about as sort of a more gravity-bound Spider-Man type, climbing up sheer walls with ease and playing tug-o-war with a helicopter, a gimmick that was better when Captain America did it in “Winter Soldier.”

Later on Kraven does break out some actual weaponry aside from flashing those abdominal muscles, including blow darts and a hooked African-style sword. His biggest ire is saved for big-game hunters who only kill for animal horns, which makes him a sort-of eco-friendly revenge warrior, I s’pose.

All in all, I’m thinking Kraven the Hunter was better left in the dustbin of minor comics figures who really didn’t need their own movie. I could see him popping up in one of the MCU flicks as a background villain, hanging around just long enough to snarl and flex, then shooshed back into whatever cage they let him out of.