Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green
Writers: Jon Bernthal, Reinaldo Marcus Green
Stars: Jon Bernthal, Chelsea Brea, Colton Hill
Synopsis: As Frank Castle searches for meaning beyond revenge, an unexpected force pulls him back into the fight.
Brooding, volatile, and cathartic; The Punisher: One Last Kill, the Marvel and Disney+ special featurette collaboration, is hard to categorize, as it defies being boxed into the constraints of normal television or movies. With a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, this precursor to Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, serves as a bridge to his next reported appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
The Punisher: One Last Kill, for all intents and purposes, is a storytelling aberration, if you will. We should not waste too much time trying to nail down where this takes place within episodic series The Punisher, Daredevil: Born Again, or the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline. Though if you care, it appears to overlap with the superior second season led by Charlie Cox, since Frank Castle does not appear in those eight glorious episodes.
This, technically, at over forty minutes, could be considered a feature film, and is a thematically heavy and visceral look at an imaginative world crumbling around us. Like Daredevil: Born Again, this authoritarian crime aberration attempts to capture a community, country, and a world spinning off its axis while still trying to find equilibrium. There is hardly any banter in the special, creating a sense of dialogue brevity.
However, there are several eye-catching visuals, including a breathtaking Steadicam continuous one-shot sequence of Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle walking through the war zone that is Hell’s Kitchen with nothing but a dingy hoodie covering his Easter Island-like head, as people are assaulted, guns are fired, and cars are lit up like bonfires ( or “bonfires of the vigilantes,” if you will). Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) makes the scene criminally hypnotic.
Then, for some reason, the special, film, or featurette lends itself to several minutes of exposition. That scene features theater royalty, and Who’s the Boss? Legend, Judith Light as Ma Gnucci, recounts Frank’s past sins. In a stroke of John Wick-like revenge, she hires every killer in the city to hunt Castle, who is still grieving the loss of his beautiful wife, Maria (Kelli Barrett), his precious daughter Lisa, and Frank Jr.
Of course, he sees them in visions, traumatically ruminating to the point that he has conversations with them. The theme of post-traumatic stress disorder is rampant, visceral, and deeply felt throughout this chapter. So much so that Castle struggles to distinguish reality from imagination. He is also haunted day and night by his three former military brothers, Curtis, Nick,, and Colton. Of course, this is where Bernthal is at his very best.
Bernthal’s trembling physicality, mood swings that can turn like a light switch, and those stoic thousand-yard stares where his eyes and clenched-jawed restraint echo a young Brando or Gandolfini. Then there is that action-packed scene where Castle attempts to escape an apartment building, blending bone-crunching thrills and dark humor, as addictive as Punisher fans will remember from the famed Netflix series.
However, what is the point? It is hard to say. If anything, this feels like a series finale, or at least a conclusion to Frank Castle’s personal inner turmoil, for the original Netflix series that ran for 26 episodes. One would think that, amid the streaming wars, Disney+ could have greenlit its own legacy-continuation series for Punisher. Instead, we are given a little over forty minutes of blood-soaked, bone-crunching, glass-pulling brutality that initially feels like nothingness.
Not necessarily. Written by Jon Bernthal and Green, The Punisher: One Last Kill is a storytelling oddity that brings Frank Castle’s full-circle journey to a close, finally allowing him to work through his grief. The “film” is pure fan service, nothing more and nothing less, but it keeps its finger firmly on the pulse of inner turmoil and reflection while putting a cherry on top of a character revived during a time when we arguably need him most, reminding audiences that anyone can heal.
Even Frank Castle, in his own vengeful, murderous, and deeply fractured kind of way. Hey, progress, is progress, is it not?
You can stream The Punisher: One Last Killexclusively on Disney + on May 12th+
