The Punisher: One Last Kill Is a Baffling, Purge-like Foray Into… Nothing Much - Reactor

While I’m hardly the Punisher’s core demographic (or probably even its secondary demographic, lets be real—I’m the sort of fan they’d prefer didn’t exist), I got roped in hard last year on account of finally admitting that Jon Bernthal is the only actor I ever want to see playing the character. After binging The Punisher series in a fugue state, I was tentatively excited for One Last Kill, and the possibility that this was intended as a stepping stone to more with the Marvel NYC set.

But I could not tell you what I just watched.

It’s fascinating to me that Bernthal has starred in what are essentially two one-off television specials that he co-wrote around popular characters he portrays in other people’s sandboxes—namely the MCU and FX’s The Bear—inside the space of a month. But while The Bear special “Gary” was a chance for Bernthal and (cowriter/former Punisher costar) Ebon Moss-Bachrach to bounce off one another for a full hour in that tense, screwy, deeply loving way that makes them mesmerizing together, One Last Kill is basically a proof-of-concept for another Punisher series that goes absolutely nowhere and contains more bland violence than a Doom speedrun.

Audiences were told that the special was meant to take place concurrent with Daredevil: Born Again season two… which is hilarious, in fact, because it not only contains zero evidence of this, but also seems to actively disprove the assertion in its framework. Frank Castle is hiding out in Queens (if the filming location is meant to be the true locale), which is portrayed as the effective opposite of what Mayor Wilson Fisk’s “Safer Streets” initiative is meant to convey; the place seems utterly lawless, for reasons never identified in any meaningful way.

We learn that Frank killed the last of the people responsible for his family’s death, being the Gnucci crime family, and that the end of this journey has resulted in a full-fledged breakdown: Frank has no idea if he wants to continue living at this point and keeps hallucinating who is in the room with him. Are these people dead? Alive? One of them is certainly living, some of them are dead, and others are unaccounted for, which dims the overall weight of this choice.

We have to acknowledge that both seasons of The Punisher also contained Frank Castle supposedly killing “the last” of the people responsible for the death of this family. At this rate, the conspiracy has taken on truly absurd levels of intricacy, and the plot of this special knows it—we’re never told how the Gnuccis were involved, only that they definitely were. Moreover, the timing, again, makes this whole issue potentially silly because of the insistence that it’s taking place during Born Again S2. There was an easy way to mitigate this issue, of course, but that would involve creating actual continuity that Marvel has been absolutely cowardly about integrating, namely:

You solve half of the problems with One Last Kill if you suggest that it’s taking place in the early days of Post-Snap. It explains the overall lawlessness and chaos, makes it (slightly) more likely that Frank would have only just finished hunting down people connected to his family’s demise, and makes far more sense of his overall attitude in Born Again season one. But Marvel Studios has so far been adamantly pretending that Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame didn’t affect anyone in this corner of their storehouse—which is going to be weird once we’re catching up with Spider-Man this summer, and the Punisher is hanging around.

But let’s go with what we’ve been told, yes? By this logic, one of two things occurred: 

First option: Frank fought his way out of Fisk’s prison basement after going in there to help Matt Murdock and Karen Page. After realizing that the two of them never bothered to storm the facility like they planned, and had no idea he was even locked up down there, he flips them the proverbial bird and gets back to his final final revenge, a thing he’d been postponing for some reason, and is now reeling over the completion of.

Second option: Frank had already completed this task prior to Born Again, and Matt literally interrupted the breakdown we see in this special by storming into his sadness basement to distract Frank with his personal grief breakdown over Foggy. Frank is briefly distracted by Karen (his absolute favorite person on earth) coming home, but his time in Fisk’s basement and the city resistance rigamarole sour him on any attempt to reconnect.

Either version is unintentionally hilarious. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to infer option two? I’m cackling about it, which was definitely not the goal here.

What we get instead is a brand new shiny villain in the form of Ma Gnucci (Judith Light!), one of Castle’s nemeses in the comics. He killed her family, and the fact that her family was involved in killing his makes no difference in this—she’s going to destroy him. She means to do this by setting a bounty so high that every grody criminal in a fifty mile radius is coming after him. This results in an absurdly high quotient of thugs and stunt actors storming Castle’s apartment building, and going positively wild on all of its inhabitants, looting, raping, and destroying his neighbor’s homes.

And sure, it makes sense that this setup allows Castle the maximum ability to save others, so that he can be reminded of his purpose, right? But it also makes no dang sense at all because all these guys would be aiming to kill each other so they could get to him cleanly. Also, genuinely, how many criminals interested in bounty hunting can there possibly be on a single city block? It’s basically Marvel’s version of The Purge, and also intensely boring to boot.

There’s some good fight choreography, but it’s so relentless (and impossible to buy as a premise) once we arrive at the action portion that it wears out fast. The sound mixing of the special is a bonafide wreck, with the dialogue planted so far beneath every other sound that characters might as well be whispering. There are a couple moments of patently awful CGI. Some segments are clearly done just for the sake of letting the actors have fun. (Frank gets set on fire at one point, which I’m assuming was a wish list item for someone.)

The only worthwhile moments occur at the start, where Bernthal and co-writer/director Reinaldo Marcus Green loaded the character work. The story still doesn’t work when it’s situated, but as a cap on Frank’s arc in the Punisher series, it makes some sense. And, of course, there’s always the Karen in Frank’s head—bringing Deborah Ann Woll into any of these shows always saves them, if only for a moment—pulling him toward the light. Born Again says that Karen and Matt are together now (and they are a very sweet, very fucked up pair), but it’s hard to buy it any time Woll and Bernthal lock eyes and do everything in their power not to devour each other.

One Last Kill was one episode of extremely temperamental television that could have at least done us the service of being film-length for our trouble. It wants to exist as a vignette to itself, and is only more baffling for the attempt. As the MCU landscape exists now, if you want to know Bernthal’s iteration of the Punisher better, the Netflix series is still what you want.