It's a new morning

Wragge & Hill stick to the basics on revamped Early Show

The Early Show debuted Monday morning with a new team — former Channel 2 sports anchor Chris Wragge and former CNN anchor Erica Hill — but not much about the first show felt very fresh.

All the same factors that The Today Show invented were showcased on the CBS morning show (7-9 a.m., Channel 11) — attractive anchors, chirpy banter, a weather forecaster (Marysol Castro) doing stand-ups outside the New York studio in front of a cheering crowd, and the same format. It began with hard news during the first half-hour, before switching to softer features like how to fight the post-holiday blues, how to stay flu-free and how to diet with a mandatory daily dose of dark chocolate as the show progressed.

It also included silly segments, like when Castro joined the Polar Bears Club in Brooklyn for a New Year's Day dip but only stayed in the water at ankle level for a few seconds, and a cross country tour the new morning team took to show that they really like each other and they're just like us (although I'm not sure after seeing news reader Jeff Glor's Zoolander impersonation).

During the stop in Houston (in which the back of my head is shown on-camera), Wragge & Co. insisted in an interview that they weren't trying to invent a new kind of morning show — and they didn't. Nothing about it was remotely offensive, but it wasn't terribly exciting, either.

I can't imagine the new show attracting viewers who don't already watch morning TV, and there's precious little to entice current morning viewers to switch from Matt and Meredith or Robin and George. As the third place morning show, trailing Today and Good Morning America, The Early Show often has to scramble for interviews and the best they could do on the debut show was an exclusive interview with Lindsay Lohan's father.

But Hill and Wragge, who anchored the CBS Saturday morning show for two years with Glor as news reader, have an easygoing rapport and seem to actually like each other. That might be enough to boost ratings a little, and in the lucrative world of morning TV, a little upward movement means a lot.

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Movie Review

Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero

Photo by Jay Maidment

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter.

One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.

Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.

The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).

Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?

The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.

That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.

Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.

With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.

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Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.

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