Summary
The Punisher: One Last Kill is very much the only kind of Punisher story Jon Bernthal seems interested in telling, but blimey, it’s tons of fun when it gets going.
It probably says a lot about Marvel’s general handling of the MCU these days that there hasn’t been a so-called “special presentation” since the idea was debuted back in 2022. It takes an effort to remember now, but the intention was to introduce new characters and mess around with style and tone in relatively disconnected corners of the wider continuity. And it was a good idea! Werewolf by Night was an interestingly fresh-feeling Halloween special, while The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special made fun of the notorious Star Wars equivalent just in time for Christmas. Then we weirdly didn’t get another for four years, until The Punisher: One Last Kill debuted on Disney+ after the success of the excellent second season of Daredevil: Born Again.
I think Jon Bernthal has become indisputable all-time-great comic-book casting by this point. He is Frank Castle, in the same way that Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man and Hugh Jackman is Wolverine. He sells the Punisher’s alarming physical presence and tortured emotional state with absolute commitment, and there will almost certainly never be a better take on the character than his. But that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily the best person to steer the character creatively, and I think One Last Kill proves it, since it seems very much like the only kind of Punisher story Bernthal is interested in telling.
I know what you’re thinking – what other Punisher stories are there? Long-time comics readers would probably have a substantial answer to that question, but it’s beside the point. We’ve been doing this dance since the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil, through two seasons of Frank’s own show, and for a portion of Daredevil: Born Again’s first season. Frank kills some bad guys, goes into hiding, grows a beard, and then comes up with a reason to keep killing more bad guys. He sees – and often talks to – people from his past, often his dead kids and his dead wife. Any time he gets near a headstone, he delivers a monologue. You know the drill.
This is One Last Kill in a nutshell, which makes you wonder why we need it. The truthful answer is that we don’t. The non-critic answer is that it probably doesn’t matter. If you like Bernthal’s Punisher, this is basically scientifically designed to give you a weapons-grade dose of him and his antics, with a couple of fun cameos from familiar faces in what was once Netflix’s carved-out corner of the MCU.
The special begins with Frank at his lowest ebb. Having wiped out everyone responsible for the death of his family, he’s contemplating retirement from Punishing, which for him means doing pull-ups and drinking neat bourbon from the bottle until he vomits. He often roars. Various ghosts from his past show up to remind him that he’s a failure, and he cries and talks to himself in the way that Bernthal has proved only he really can.
It’s a more literal ghost that Frank has to worry about. Ma Gnucci (Judith Light, All’s Fair), the wheelchair-bound matriarch of a crime family that he wiped out during his revenge mission, has put a bounty out on his head, which she explains to him at length, entirely for the audience’s benefit. To give this premise more legs, New York City has become, for some reason, a lawless dystopian hellscape where criminals just operate brazenly in broad daylight. It’s closer to The Warriors than anything else in the MCU, but it means that when things kick off, they really kick off on a city-wide scale.
And once that happens, it’s easy to forgive any minor nitpicks with the writing and thematic depth. The back half of One Last Kill is basically an extended, operatic action sequence, one of the better ones committed to film anywhere in the franchise, and if you’re into the Bernthal brand of bloodletting, it’s essentially impossible not to enjoy it. At one point, Frank fights a bunch of goons while he’s on fire. He stabs and shoots and brutalizes legions of people, screams a whole bunch, and looks very contemplatively at a little girl who unavoidably reminds him of his daughter, Lisa. It’s a greatest hits tour, essentially. And the body count is, contrary to the title, way higher than just one.
Again, we didn’t strictly need The Punisher: One Last Kill. In truth, it – and indeed the Punisher as a conception – is a little ill-fitting for what Marvel wants to deliver to a mass-market, given that he’s unequivocally a murderous lunatic. But it’s so fun to watch him stand up for the little guy that you can square any minor concerns away easily enough. Only one last kill? Seriously, why stop there?
