The Punisher: One Last Kill Review

Jon Bernthal racks up a stupendous body count in The Punisher’s first solo outing on Disney+.

The title of the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe offering is a tad misleading. Perhaps The Punisher: The Latest Several Dozen Kills of Many More to Come is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s far more accurate. I didn’t keep count, but we may be edging into triple figures by the time the credits roll. That Frank Castle, man – he’s a worker.

When we reconnect with Frank (Jon Bernthal in the role he’s made his own) he’s doing chin ups til his hands bleed, downing bourbon like it’s Gatorade, and blasting Danzig at maximum volume. Whereas the comics incarnation of The Punisher is most often depicted as a cold, calculating killer, Bernthal’s take on the character is much more volatile. He’s a ball of inchoate rage barely held in check, wracked with PTSD, furious at the injustice that’s been meted out to him, and straining at the leash to dish out some payback. He’s frequently lost, directionless, and suicidal. Since introducing the character to MCU continuity in the second season of Daredevil back when ol’ hornhead still called Netflix home, the powers that be have vacillated over what exactly his self-imposed mission is. Does the lethal ex-Marine murder machine want to wipe out all crime as violently as possible, or just the various gangsters connected to the murder of his wife and kids?

The Punisher: One Last Kill splits the difference and forces a choice, telling us that our boy has just wiped the Gnucci crime family off the evolutionary ladder, and they were the last group connected to his family’s slaughter. Almost simultaneously, it shows us that the streets are still mean, with the fictional neighbourhood of Little Sicily overrun by a wide variety of thugs, punks, and ne’er-do-wells – we see one gang toss a homeless veteran’s pet mutt under a truck just for kicks. Obviously, no matter how guilt-ridden and suicidal Frank is, no matter how many hallucinations of lost comrades and loved ones he sees, these people need killing.

And, thanks to a bounty put on his head by vengeful widow Gnucci (Judith Light in a very different role to her recent turn on Shrinking), the killing starts promptly. Every unjustifiably overconfident goon in the five boroughs comes barreling into Frank’s hood to take his scalp, and Frank? Well, he barrels right back, with the bulk of One Last Kill‘s lean 48 minute running time devoted to one long, extremely bloody, impressively creative combat sequence.

It’s glorious.

Now, we can argue all day about the moral complexity or lack thereof of Frank Castle, and the best works involving the character do – his most recent appearance in Daredevil: Born Again season one has a lot of fun when Frank tells a squad of vigilante cops who have adopted his iconic skull exactly what he thinks of them. But we shouldn’t go do too far down that path without acknowledging the sheer cathartic joy of watching the Punisher carve his way through an army of scumbags who richly deserve it.

Here, we get to see Frank completely unleash, and the sheer variety of carnage on display is impressive, if a little video game-y as Frank works his way up from a knife, to a baseball bat, an axe, a shotgun, an AK, and so on and so on, occasionally mixing things up by tossing some poor bastard over a balcony or stabbing them to death with a pen. Structurally, it’s a mix of The Raid and The Purge – many of the mooks are masked, which is a neat way to be able to reuse stunt performers. Tonally, the visceral violence isn’t a million miles away from Timo Tjahjanto’s gruesome masterpiece, The Night Comes for Us.

He does all this while rocking a grubby hoody, because we are once again building up to the point where Frank straps on the skull-blazoned body armour, making this a low key Surf Dracula scenario. But seeing Frank struggle with his sense of purpose yet again is doing the character no favours. He was wrestling with the same question back in the first season of his eponymous Netflix series, after all, and besides, we just saw him cheerfully butchering battalions of bad guys in DD:BA S1 (One Last Kill takes place concurrent to season two, more or less, and no, that doesn’t make much sense). Given that Bernthal co-wrote this with director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), it’s a little disappointing that we’re forced to go over such well trod ground.

But implicit in the final sequence is the promise that we’re done with that: from now on the Punisher will be Punishin’. For his next outing he’ll be teaming up with Spider-Man for Brand New Day, so we can expect a much more family friendly stripe of mass murder. But more than anything else, One Last Kill feels like a proof of concept short for another Punisher theatrical feature, and I’d say the concept has been well and truly proved.

The Punisher: One Last Kill is streaming on Disney+ now.