Kraven only lived so that he could die. Kraven’s role in Kraven’s Last Hunt, opposite Spider-Man in a run of his comics, was to affirm the core values of Peter Parker, as a man. To prove himself as the ultimate hunter of dangerous game, Kraven hungered to usurp Spider-Man, drugging and burying him alive, only to don a black version of his costume and go about doing Spider-Man business in a brutally vicious but far more efficient manner. Then, Spider-Man dug himself out of his grave and confronted Kraven. And what did Kraven do? He hunted the ultimate game, became him, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, because to really be Spider-Man, it would require the humanism of Peter Parker. So, Kraven finally accomplished what he wanted and hunted the true most dangerous prey and took him own life.
The primal animalism of Kraven is the point. The first thing Kraven the Hunter establishes is Kraven’s humanity. During the Russian Revolution, Kraven’s parents were wealthy aristocrats run out by the Bolsheviks, which drove his mom to madness and his father to suicide. He is a sympathetic character, see, but is not a hero, and the movie builds him heroically. He’s a protector of animals and hunts the baddest men. Yeah, whatever.
What happens in the comics is that Kraven’s brother Chameleon, already a ne’er-do-well supervillain himself, turns the knife on his brother’s trauma; the only way to really claim redemption, he suggests, is to prove his primal superiority by hunting the most dangerous game and the most dangerous game was whatever happened to threaten Chameleon’s criminal enterprise. Spider-Man.
Not in the movie. The movie doesn’t have Spider-Man in it. Did you know they apparently can use Spider-Man? What are they doing? What’s Kraven’s purpose in the movie then? Who fucking knows. Kraven gets bit by a lion and his Dad Russel Crowe puts it down so he swears off violence for good but this gal gives him this truth serum which turns him into an animal capable of violence. Kraven grows up to be Aaron Taylor Johnson and he’s really handsome. The girl grows up to be Ariana DeBose and she’s a good actor. Old dad, Russel Crowe, has a criminal empire in this one, so Kraven pursues the violent underbosses to prove something about not choosing generational violence. Kraven has to fight this guy called Rhino who has thick skin and he’s played by Alessandro Nivola who is not following direction, or is the only one who is.
Kraven the Hunter is not just a formal misunderstanding of why Kraven is a good villain, but a genuinely different story about a different character doing different things. It does not add anything meaningful about his characterization and in fact misinterprets what his character is meant to do, doesn’t understand or establish what his powers are, and generally flounders like a dying fish for over two hours. Then it doesn’t have any post credits scenes at all because Sony knew they really fucked up.
Go read The Last Hunt, a dark and foreboding character study of maleness, anger, revenge, and loss. Do not see Kraven the Hunter, a trivial bit of villain origin storytelling that ends about where it should have started. May Kraven never hunt again.