Filled with enough family upheaval to stuff a John Osborne play and a stellar action turn from star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven the Hunter is too beholden to its superhero roots – and too afraid to push its familial drama as far as possible – to get the most out of its disparate pieces.

The choice to make films about Spider-Man villains without the man himself has been fraught and unproductive so far (no amount of box office will give the Venom films a soul) as filmmaker after filmmaker has searched for something to fill that web-shaped hole. Director J.C. Chandor, no stranger to character drama, has looked inward to one of Spider-Man’s oldest C-list foes to ask what would a man named Sergei Kravinoff, who dresses in a lion skin suit to hunt dangerous animals, be in this modern world?

The logical answer is a scion of Russian oligarchs and crime bosses.