A soldier without a mission is aimless. Frank Castle without a purpose is dangerous, especially to himself. That’s the depressing, bloody core of “Punisher: One Last Kill,” the new Marvel Studios Special Presentation. This isn’t a triumphant comeback for a hero or a big, explosive, satisfyingly brutal show about the Punisher. It’s much more contained, quite a bit more unpleasant, and frankly odd. It’s the story of a broken, deeply sad in-between time: what The Punisher does when he’s done with all the punishing and is completely alone with his thoughts.
Jon Bernthal returns to further solidify himself as the definitive version of the character, bringing the same intense, raw energy to the role that he has time after time. Poor Frank is at his lowest point at the start of this special. He drinks like it’s his job, takes pills by the handful, tears down the faces of his dead targets, and feels more like a piece of something destroyed, yet still somehow walking around New York than an active vigilante. The opening, set to Danzig’s “Mother” (you’ll get it later), is very upfront about its intentions. Frank is an animal in a cage, but the cage is his own body, his past, and the apartment he’s turned into a memorial to violence.
The Special Presentation is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (who previously worked with Bernthal on “We Own This City” and “King Richard”), co-written by Bernthal, and is somehow the darkest the Marvel universe has gone with this character. It feels partly like a siege movie, a severe PTSD breakdown, and the fighting has the rhythm of a no B.S. action nightmare. It’s like “The Raid,” but after three sleepless nights and a visit from all of the ghosts Frank’s been trying to escape. The story isn’t complicated, and actually, that’s both the good and the bad thing about it. Frank has wiped out the infamous Gnucci New York crime family, possibly the last connection to the people who murdered his family. Then the remaining matriarch of the family comes to see him, not to plead or make a deal, but to look him in the eye and tell him it’s time to pay.
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The best idea in the special is that getting revenge hasn’t freed Frank. It’s left him empty. When the killing stops, there’s no peace. Only quietness, being withdrawn, and the awful weight of continuing to live when everyone he loved is dead. The best scenes early on get this. Frank goes to his family’s graves, talks to his wife and children, and considers joining them. Bernthal plays those moments with a heavy, worn-out shame. He doesn’t make Frank softer, but he lets the audience see the tiredness underneath the anger. This is a man who has lived so long that simply continuing to live is now another form of punishment.
At least Marvel isn’t trying to water The Punisher down before he crosses over with everyone’s favorite webslinger later this summer. The special isn’t asking if Frank Castle should kill bad people. It’s asking what is left of him when killing bad people stops giving him a reason to go on. The answer is anything but pleasant, but it isn’t nothing. Frank wants the fighting to be over because he’s mentally exhausted, not because he’s found closure. He needs purpose, but, like any good soldier, all he knows is violence. When the special is at its best, it turns this conflict into something truly heartbreaking.
At 6:47 pm, the price for everything is due, and Green shifts the special into a totally brutal, animalistic mode, complete with multiple versions of that primal Frank scream that we’ve come to know. Frank’s apartment building turns into a place of fire, bodies, and seriously poor choices. Assassins and other random greedy idiots pour in, the neighbors are terrified, and rooms are set ablaze. As expected, Frank goes through the attackers as efficiently as someone who has stopped pretending to be a normal member of society. The fighting is ridiculously harsh and purposefully unpleasant. Bones snap with sharp sounds, and knives go in with a heavy thud. Green wisely avoids making it look too polished. This is Frank Castle after all. He shouldn’t move like a superhero. He should move like a feral beast finally allowed to go completely wild.
The special’s intense focus on Frank, however, has a downside. The people around him, like Ma Gnucci, the neighbors across the hall, the shopkeeper, his wife and daughter, the homeless veterans, and all the ordinary people caught up in everything, don’t really get a chance to develop. They mostly serve to show us what’s right, wrong, or what happens as a result of actions. While that works to a degree in a short special like this (it’s really inside Frank’s broken mind, not a story with lots of main characters), it does limit the emotional impact. The world around Frank feels real at times, then becomes flat whenever someone is needed to represent innocence, cruelty, or the consequences of what’s happening. It also doesn’t help that this New York isn’t really the same one that we’ve seen in Daredevil or Spider-Man adventures. Either that, or Frank’s little block is a strange, isolated, over-the-top hellscape populated mostly by corny thugs.
Ma Gnucci is the most fully realized of the supporting characters, and largely because she understands Frank better than anyone else. She doesn’t see a famous figure or a terrifying monster from afar; she sees the man who took her family, and her blame feels true because the special doesn’t deny she’s right. Frank did kill criminals, but he also destroyed a family in front of their mother. Her plan for revenge is simple, perhaps overly so, but her point gives the special its moral weight. In this story, everyone is a villain or a ghost to someone.
And that’s where “One Last Kill” finds its most compelling conflict. It wants to give us the violent Punisher action we expect, and it certainly delivers. But it also wants to examine the decay that lies beneath all that violence. Frank’s violence actually protects people in the latter part of the special, specifically during a very effective, grim scene in which a local shop is attacked. This gives him a little bit of purpose. It’s not forgiveness or a clearing of his conscience. It’s simply a small, bloody reminder that his fight can still protect someone who is still alive, not just the dead. It’s a subtle difference, but Bernthal makes it work.
And that’s where Marvel should thank its lucky stars here. Bernthal is still the reason this version of the character is so good and that the special is watchable. He can make Frank frightening without making him seem “cool” in a bad way. He’s physically imposing, certainly, but his best acting here is in the quiet moments: the way he looks at a grave, his own visible disgust with his reflection, the fact that a child’s kindness affects him more than being stabbed. Bernthal gets that Frank Castle isn’t just angry with boots on.
The special sometimes pushes this material a little too forcefully, particularly when visions spell out conflicts that are already perfectly clear in Bernthal’s expression. Still, the emotion behind it is strong enough to overcome the directness.
The wider Marvel universe doesn’t really factor in here, and that’s mostly a good thing. “One Last Kill” feels more like a dark, self-contained story about a character than the next part of a big franchise. Yes, it is bridging the gap between Frank’s Netflix era, his “Born Again” era, and his upcoming “PG-13” Spidey era. Yet, it doesn’t use its short running time to set up six future plotlines. It gives Frank a night of settling scores, a lot of dead bodies, and a reason to keep going. In an age where comic book stories often come with a lot of backstory to catch up on, it’s nice how separate from everything else this one is.
However, being streamlined can also mean lacking substance. At times, “One Last Kill” feels more like a long, drawn-out mood than a completely satisfying story in itself. It starts strongly, has a brutal middle section, and ends on a haunting note, but it lacks the complex plot of the best Punisher tales. Its thoughts on grief, what gives someone a purpose, and violence are powerful, but aren’t explored in a lot of detail. It understands Frank is damaged. It understands that his damage can be turned on people who deserve it. It doesn’t always know what to do with that fact, beyond sending him down another corridor filled with people to kill.
Still, despite all this, there’s something worthwhile in seeing a Marvel project this unflinchingly dark, contained, and not worrying about making everything nice. “Punisher: One Last Kill” isn’t the deepest Frank Castle story, but it’s one of the bleakest in its look and feel. It’s a brief, bloody journey into the life of a man who got his revenge and found nothing waiting for him except more emptiness. By the end, Frank hasn’t found peace. He’s found something to do. And for this character, that may be the closest he’ll get to hope. [C+]
