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Punisher: One Last Kill is a decent, blood-soaked chapter in Frank Castle’s Marvel screen story, and a welcome solo return for those who have been following Jon Bernthal’s take on the character since the Netflix days. It is also, unfortunately, too familiar and limited for its own good.
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Bernthal remains fantastic in the role. No surprise there. He still feels perfectly cast as Frank Castle, once again throwing everything into a man who is utterly broken, burnt out, unhinged, and barely holding himself together. There’s an intensity to Bernthal’s performance that continues to make his Punisher feel dangerous in a way few Marvel characters do. He does not simply play Frank as angry; he plays him as someone permanently damaged, carrying grief like an open wound.
The problem is that One Last Kill spends a lot of its limited runtime going back over ground that has already been covered, and covered better, in the character’s two-season Netflix series. We get Frank’s internal collapse, flashbacks to the death of his family, and painful ties to his military past. For newcomers, this may work as a harsh, quick introduction to the character and the trauma that drives him. For those already familiar with Bernthal’s Punisher, however, it can feel like another pass at the same wounds without enough new insight.
That issue is made more noticeable by the one-shot format. At under 50 minutes, the special feels less like a fully satisfying standalone story and more like a solid extra episode. There is only so much room to build a satisfying arc, and the story here is fairly simple: a very unwell Frank is pushed into another brutal situation, and bodies start dropping. That is not necessarily a bad setup for a Punisher outing, although compared with Marvel’s stronger special presentations, such as Werewolf by Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, this one feels noticeably thinner.
The depiction of Frank’s mental state becomes a little one-note. Yes, he is broken. Yes, he is haunted. Yes, he is barely functioning. Bernthal sells every second of it. The material around him simply doesn’t push the character much further.
When the narrative thrust is made clear and Frank is thrown back into the flames, the special finds a much stronger gear. The action is gritty, intense, and certainly among the more brutal material Marvel has delivered under the Disney banner. Up-close shotgun blasts, throat cuts, pen stabs to the face… We’re a long way from soft-edged Marvel violence.
The action is fairly well constructed and the kills are brutal, with a few landing especially hard. Even so, there’s still a sense that the carnage could have been further juiced creatively. If you are playing in a sandbox that allows for all manner of bloody mayhem, why not get a little more inventive with the slaughter? A little more ambition in the combat sequences, and a few more gnarly, memorable showdowns, would have gone a long way. After all, films like The Raid and Dredd have shown the kind of fun you can have when an apartment block is turned into a warzone. And perhaps I’m being a little picky, but there are simply too many obvious CGI squirts and sprays of blood here. Not to mention one much-discussed CG misstep.
The hellish, crime-infested landscape of Little Sicily is quickly and effectively established, even if it feels a touch exaggerated. A strong sequence follows Frank down the street as chaos erupts around him, with crime seemingly swallowing the city whole. It is one of the special’s better visual ideas, showing this erupting inferno and our antihero’s detached attitude to it all. It also raises the usual MCU question: we’re in New York and Queens has fallen apart to an insane degree, so where are all the heroes — any one of them? Yeah, it is what it is.
Punisher: One Last Kill does what it needs to do on a basic level. It gives Bernthal room to brood, mourn, rage, and rack up a giant kill count in a compact runtime. As a Frank Castle chapter, it is solid enough: a violent appetiser that leaves you wanting the main course. And with Marvel, a studio rarely without one eye on the bigger picture, perhaps that’s the point. Here’s hoping the studio has something bigger, sharper, and more narratively substantial planned for Bernthal’s Punisher down the line.
