Despite Marvel’s success at delivering superpowered spectacle, its action sequences have generally left aficionados wanting.
It’s a bracing stunner, then, to discover the most exhilarating combat in the studio’s history in The Punisher: One Last Kill, a 48-minute Disney+ special (May 12) that bridges the gap between the streamer’s Daredevil: Born Again, Netflix’s prior The Punisher, and this summer’s big-screen sequel Spider-Man: Brand New Day. In terms of no-holds-barred ultra-violence, it’s like John Wick times one thousand.
Headlining his second straight one-off following last week’s The Bear supplement Gary, Jon Bernthal reprises his role as Marvel’s brutally ruthless vigilante in The Punisher: One Last Kill, whose opening use of Danzig’s “Mother” sets an appropriate heavy-metal tone for the mayhem to come.
Having avenged his relatives’ slaying by exterminating the Gnucci crime family, Frank Castle (Bernthal), aka The Punisher, is a lost and broken loner, doing pull-ups until his fingers are bloody and he’s puking in a bucket, and ranting and weeping as the ghosts of his Marine comrades taunt and laugh at him.
Wiping clean his evidence board, Frank has completed his mission but found little solace, his scruffy face vacillating between sobs and screams, and his anger and self-loathing so great that he carves up the military tattoo on his chest.
Ready to halt his slaughtering ways, Frank locks up his guns and leaves the key at the graves of his beloved family, whom he can’t stop thinking about as he prepares to end his life. “There’s nothing left to do,” he wails. However, he can’t pull the trigger, and on a walk through his Little Sicily neighborhood, he gets a first-person view of the urban anarchy created by the power vacuum left by the Gnuccis’ elimination.
After a brief stop at Dre’s (Andre Royo) coffee shop, where he shares a silent, compassionate stare with the proprietor’s daughter Charli (Mila Jaymes), Frank stalks the streets, and in a single take, King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s camera captures this chaos while focusing intently on Frank’s forlorn and guilt-stricken visage—the first of The Punisher: One Last Kill’s evocative formal flourishes.
Frank’s purposelessness doesn’t last long, as he’s confronted on his stroll by Ma (Judith Light), the Gnucci clan’s wheelchair-bound matriarch. “Loneliness…it’s like a hunger.
A dreadful, nasty, ever-present hunger you just can’t shake,” she tells him before announcing that—thanks to his murdering her husband and sons (which are seen in brief flashbacks)—she’s put a bounty on his head and, in a few hours’ time, the city’s underworld denizens will descend upon him. Even this doesn’t quite shake Frank out of his stupor. Yet following a hallucination involving a former friend, he’s thrust into battle when the hordes appear on his doorstep.
Having poignantly dramatized Frank’s misery, The Punisher: One Last Kill subsequently explodes in carnage that would make most R-rated movies gasp in horror.
Co-written by Green and Bernthal, the episode spends its back half pitting Frank against a steady stream of faceless attackers, whom he fights with his fists, knives, firearms (pistols, machine guns, shotguns), a hand axe, a metal pipe, a coffee pot, and—in a faceoff against a heavily tattooed marauder that’s unquestionably the gnarliest moment in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe—a pen. Taking inspiration from the 21st-century’s most vicious big-screen efforts (John Wick, The Raid, Dredd, Sisu, The Night Comes for Us), it’s a bloodbath of shocking proportions.
Rated TV-MA for good reason, The Punisher: One Last Kill not only doesn’t pull its punches—it gets actively up-close-and-personal with Frank’s grim handiwork, which he performs in stairwells and hallways, on rooftops and at intersections, and ultimately for the benefit of not simply his own survival but the safety of New York City’s innocents. In that regard, this stand-alone endeavor reveals itself as a bridge between Frank’s vengeful past and quasi-heroic future, giving him a larger, selfless objective for continuing to shoot first and ask questions never—a transformation that seems like a clear set-up for his forthcoming run-in with the Big Apple’s famous web-slinger.
That encounter will surely be a more family-friendly affair than The Punisher: One Last Kill, whose tale is strictly for adults only—an approach that’s true to the darkest, ugliest side of the Marvel character, and which gives the material its anguished, unhinged power. Frequently accused of being comics’ favorite fascist for his judge-jury-executioner method of doling out justice, the Punisher has always existed on the border between good and evil, and Green’s special casts him as the sort of antihero who, in recent decades, has become ubiquitous—a tortured and rage-filled soul who crosses the line for good and noble reasons.
With Bernthal intensely tapping into Frank’s torment and the kill-‘em-all madness it breeds, The Punisher: One Last Kill strikes an assured balance between rah-rah heroism and scary psychosis. It probably doesn’t portend a more sadistic MCU future, but for those craving a less cartoony superhero saga, it’ll be just what the butcher ordered.
