johannes2000-1

Okay, the premise had potential: a 6 yo kid accidentally kills Santa Claus, and later as a high school teen he tries to bring Santa back to life with the kept brains, a stolen body from the morgue and the electricity from a bolt of lightning. Hence the somewhat lame title, based on Frankenstein. And okay, both leads (Jared Korotkin and Ophelia Rivera) were cute.

But for the rest, everything seems to be wrong! The story was way too farfetched, even for such a silly horror comedy. The editing was totally off, with many almost blank and silent moments that kept bringing the pace to standstill. There was some intended humor, but all the funny lines and situations constantly fell flat due to the bad editing. The dialogues seemed somehow to be dubbed, the speech was never in sync with the lips - were the actors even speaking English? The score varied from uninspiring, intended to be suspenseful little riffs to endless stretches of silence, and the photography was lackluster and grey.

Anyway, I did keep watching, mostly out of sympathy, for that was the word that kept coming to my mind: it was all clearly meant well, and the cast did their best. But the producers should have known better.

I had some mixed feelings about this movie. It's basically a whodunnit, and in that capacity it makes you keep watching till the end to see who's the culprit. That solution comes by the way with a very inventive and surprising (at least to me) twist, that ultimately turns the whole plot upside down.

But there was a whole lot wrong too. There were too many main characters, who hardly got any background, so it was hard to tie the right names to the right persons or to even keep them apart. They were all pretty unsympathetic, in fact I couldn't fathom why they were even friends or wanted to go on this trip together, from the very start everyone was cranky and bickering and insulting each other. The story is supposed to take place in some beautiful unspoiled natural surrounding, but the actual setting was for the biggest part of the movie limited to a small uninspiring camping ground. And the acting was just adequate, nothing more.

So to get to the who-did-it solution with the inventive twist, you first have to endure some tough and tedious one and a half hour.

Maybe this Kraven isn't the most spectacular Marvel movie, but I still had a pretty good time with it. The genesis of Kraven's superpowers is a bit farfetched (well, the same goes of course for all the other supers!), and the villains are pictured rather lame and lackluster: the Rhino-character behaved most of the time ridiculous (and his Rhinoceros powers came halfway the movie totally out of the blue), and The Foreigner was almost non-descript. But Taylor-Johnson put down a very strong and charismatic hero, and the CGI and special effects were absolutely great. And I liked the background story of the Kravinoff family, with the strained father-sons and brother-brother relationships, it gave it all some extra depth. Russell Crowe by the way did a great job as the egotistical and domineering father.