Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger and Alessandro Nivola also star in J.C. Chandor’s action thriller about the vigilante son of a Russian gangster.

There’s an amusing moment midway through the punishingly dull Kraven the Hunter, in which Ariana DeBose — playing a high-powered lawyer linked to a pileup of gangster killings, who flees a team of hitmen in her London office and lands in Siberia — says with a straight face, “I don’t like the feel of this at all.” No kidding. The scene probably wasn’t intended for laughs, but it nonetheless makes you wish director J.C. Chandor and the writers had committed to the silliness of this muddled Marvel villain origin story with a touch more winking humor.

Originally scheduled for a January 2023 release, the film was pushed back three times — delays which don’t appear to have been used to polish the shoddy CG work — and is now making an optimistic play for Christmas counterprogramming traction.

Once you subtract the Spider-Man obsession, it’s unclear exactly what kind of antihero Kraven is meant to be. He’s introduced (in an eight-minute opening sequence released online by Sony earlier this month) arriving with a busload of new inmates at a remote, snowbound prison to the blustery strains of Basil Poledouris’ Russian choral anthem, “Hymn to Red October,” from some Sean Connery submarine movie.

Kraven wastes no time showing the prison-yard heavies he’s not to be messed with. That gets him summoned to the office of crime boss Seymon Chorney (Yuri Kolokolnikov), whom he proceeds to kill with a saber tooth extracted from the tiger rug on the floor. His daring escape has him scrambling up walls, bounding over roofs and jumping from great heights, with what seems more like animal agility than mere human strength.

We get to the root of that physical prowess once the action rewinds 16 years to when Kraven, then known by his birth name, Sergei Kravinoff, and his half-brother Dmitri (played as teenagers by Levi Miller and Billy Barratt, respectively) are pulled out of school in New York by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe).

Suicide nixes a church funeral, so Nikolai takes the boys big game-hunting in Northern Ghana instead because, well, why not? Lots of macho blather follows about Sergei and Dmitri being soft and needing to become men. Nikolai intends to show them how by killing a legendary lion that has eluded hunters for decades. “Man who kill legend becomes legend,” he tells them, at least getting one verb right. But that encounter doesn’t go as planned, leaving Sergei badly mauled and near death.

Also in Ghana is the young Calypso, talking tarot with her mystic grandmother, who gives her a special cure-all potion that bestows strange powers and tells her she’ll know when to use it. Naturally, Sergei is the lucky recipient. The potion, along with a drop or two of lion’s blood, brings him back to life after being pronounced dead. He wakes up with luminous amber lion eyes and heightened senses.  

As if that laborious set-up wasn’t enough, we’re also introduced to Russian mercenary Aleksei Sytsevich — played by Alessandro Nivola, who gets some gonzo kicks out of the role, but deserves better. He cozies up to Nikolai, suggesting they become partners, but is rudely rebuffed, possibly because he’s wearing Javier Bardem’s old hair from No Country for Old Men. He will resurface later with a better haircut and a freakish transformative ability whenever he unplugs a tube pumping fluids into him from a tiny backpack. Good luck figuring out how that works.