Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Barely have an awareness that the character exists in Spider-Man’s world. As this clearly didn’t strain my patience with attempts to tie its main character to the wall-crawler, I’m still not all that aware of it.

Did I Like It: I’m like most Americans. I eat beef. I’m angry about anywhere between a half dozen to two dozen things in life in the 2020s. I also had no interest in any Spider-Man film that doesn’t actually feature Spider-Man.

But then I started a podcast about bad movies, and that Sony’s flailing attempts to double down on the strategy that was brought out into open by North Korea* and bring the Sinister Six to the screen were coming for me. Both the character and series surrounding Venom (2018) have their fans, and golly, do I wish them well. Morbius (2022) might have been on the level of Citizen Kane (1941), but Jared Leto is so annoying, I wasn’t going to see it. No one who made Madame Web (2024) seemed like they wanted to be there, and in the great empathy machine that is the moving picture, I was right there with them.

And then there’s Kraven. There are only a few line readings that are worthy of derision, and only a few puts it in the lead for this series that never really was. The plot is kind bland, but it doesn’t ring as a traffic jam of things no one could possibly care about, so again, point to Kraven. Taylor-Johnson is occasionally a very charming screen presence, almost to the point where I suspect the rationale for participating in this film that was never, ever going to become a franchise was that Taylor-Johnson wanted to be on screen exuding a James Bond-like mystique to him, so that he could document such a quality before the EON people ever asked him to screen test.

*Kids, ask your parents.

Thelma (2024)

Director: Josh Margolin

Cast: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Clark Gregg

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. I’ve been oddly thwarted in my attempts to see the film over the course of the summer. Not the troubles I had with Wildcat (2023), but then again few things are. Imagine the egg on my face when I emerged, bleary-eyed from a screening of Horizon – An American Saga: Chapter One (2024) weeks ago to find that my plans to immediately pick up a screening of this, only to find that it had been sold out.

Did I Like It: This movie is sort of spooky, if I’m being perfectly honest. Sure, it’s a wonderful twist on a tried and true format of someone getting wronged, finding the world doesn’t really care, and the taking matters into their own hands, except the Charles Bronsan character is played by a woman in her 90s (Squibb). That subversion of the form provides some fresh avenues for humor, but it is never at anyone’s expense. Thelma may be diminished (as her friend Ben (Roundtree) might say) by age, but she is no dummy, nor is she the kind of quaint bumpkin-sage who Forrest Gump’s their way to a successful evening of the score. Similarly, her gen-z grandson Daniel (Hechinger) is lost in and overwhelmed by a world for which he wasn’t ready, but he takes enough after his grandma that when Thelma tells him she never had to worry about him, we aren’t worried about him either.

But how is it spooky? Well Daniel is a 24-year-old underachiever rambling around town in a mid-80s Diesel Mercedes barely kept together and far too messy for any reasonable adult to comprehend. As someone who was once a 24-year-old underachiever (some may say I got my act together just under the wire before 24, others may shake their head just as hard at the 40-year-old version) that strikes a little closer to home. There’s that moment in your life where you look at your parents and it seems like you’re being asked to play poker with Monopoly tokens, and your grandparents are similarly put upon for exactly the same reason. Maybe I just miss my various grandmas, but I’ve been thinking about them and Thelma since finally getting to see the movie.