[This article contains spoilers for The Punisher: One Last Kill.]
Marvel Television is calling The Punisher: One Last Kill a “Special Presentation,” but why not “One-Shot”? Gun puns aside, that’s what it most resembles: a self-contained comic that showcases a character’s strengths while exploring what makes them tick. In the case of Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, One Last Kill feels like the TV equivalent of a one-shot, a midway explosion in a gripping season of TV that doesn’t yet exist, and a confident tease of punishments to come. Put simply, this is a primer for future Punisher appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a pretty entertaining one at that.
For a 45-minute glimpse into what’s been going on with Frank since he escaped the clutches of Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Daredevil: Born Again, One Last Kill is conspicuously uninterested in connective tissue. It doesn’t explain what the Punisher has been up to in the final days of Mayor Fisk’s reign—like, say, punishing Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force, which appropriated his skull insignia during their brief campaign of terror. The special doesn’t even bother clarifying how Spider-Man is supposed to be on a first-name basis with him by Brand New Day. As a status update on Bernthal’s Punisher, it does little to ground him in coherent MCU continuity, and that’s a good thing.
Because One Last Kill has other stuff on its mind, and its discipline is reserved for the brutality that dominates its second half. The special thrives outside Marvel’s franchise fussiness—which feels more relaxed than ever, even with a new Avengers movie looming—indulging in the stabby-stabby, shooty-shooty carnage for which the Punisher is infamous. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), who co-wrote the script with Bernthal, it serves one purpose above all else: reassuring fans that while the Punisher now plays in the MCU sandbox alongside the likes of Spidey and She-Hulk, Frank Castle is still Frank Castle. His tug-of-war between reinvention and annihilation provides driving tension; Frank is figuring out what moving on looks like, one bullet-riddled corpse at a time.
What he’s moving on from, of course, is finally avenging the deaths of his wife and two children, a grim milestone that haunts One Last Kill. With his family’s killers now disposed of (events captured in Netflix’s Punisher series), the special opens with Frank holed up in an apartment complex in Little Sicily—a neighborhood, we’re told through handy-dandy newsreels, in chaos after the Punisher wiped out the Gnucci crime family. The resulting power vacuum invites mayhem on the streets; in one impressive tracking shot, we see Frank trudging despondently through his mess, a man without a mission. The sounds of screams, broken glass, and burning police vehicles bleed into a thrum of helicopters and automatic gunfire, as visions of his time as a Marine in Afghanistan play behind his eyes. The Punisher, it seems, has put his punishing days behind him. Now, he fights a war for one.
It’s a coy suggestion to tease out for the first 20-odd minutes of the special, but come on. Within seconds of appearing onscreen, Bernthal is grunting and bellowing in that primal, terrifying, sometimes ridiculous way that suggests Frank is already losing this war with himself. The Punisher glowers at the periphery of Frank’s fugue state like a caged animal, an internal struggle that Green and Bernthal elucidate through images of self-destruction: Frank numbs himself with pills and whiskey; he carves an ‘x’ across his chest, obscuring his Marine tattoo with blood; and in the special’s most disturbing moment, he sits beside his family’s graves with a pistol pressed to his head. “There’s nothing left to do,” he mutters. “I’m fucking tired.” He’d pull the trigger, too, if not for the Greek chorus rattling around inside his skull.
There’s his family, naturally, and the voices of his fallen brothers-in-arms and old companions who refuse to let him be. Most prominent is Curtis (Jason R. Moore), the veteran counselor from The Punisher, who shifts from comforting Frank to taunting him into action. In a rare moment of vulnerability, Castle admits to him, through tears, that he needs help, and Bernthal makes the words sound physically painful to say aloud. Then comes Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), who embraces him in a moment of tenderness. These are hallucinations of Frank’s crumbling sanity, maybe, but it hardly matters. They stay his hand all the same, because their presence represents some part of him that knows a new mission lies just over the horizon. “What’s your purpose now, Marine?” Curtis asks. It’s the question One Last Kill poses to Frank: What does the Punisher do with himself once his private war is over?
The answer arrives in the form of Ma Gnucci (a bewilderingly vicious Judith Light), who shows up at Frank’s absolute nadir with a reminder that violence is the only language people like them understand. “Every madman, crook, and killer [in Little Sicily] worked for us, and now they’re desperate,” she sneers. Ma has placed a bounty on Frank’s head for wiping out her entire family and has directed all interested parties to his current residence. “You made your bed,” she tells him. “Now rot in it.”
Ma’s gauntlet is a homecoming of sorts for The Punisher, who has marauded through the Marvel Universe since 1974 but has largely remained peripheral in the MCU until now. It’s fitting that the inciting incident to One Last Kill’s ensuing havoc draws on Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s “Welcome Back, Frank” arc from the Marvel Knights run in 2000. In that story, Castle returns to New York and becomes embroiled in the sordid affairs of the Gnucci syndicate, systematically offing each member in exceptionally Ennisonian fashion.
Frank’s campaign against the Gnuccis kicks off One Last Kill, though it occurs largely off-screen and through flashbacks. Bernthal and Green aren’t anarchic stylists like Ennis and Dillon; wisely, they don’t bother attempting the darkly hilarious ultra-violence those comics had in spades. Instead, they opt for something rooted in the psychological torments that defined two seasons of Netflix’s Punisher. The hard-R action, when it comes, is gnarly within reason.
With that, One Last Kill shifts into siege mode, delivering a series of well-choreographed close-quarters set pieces that evoke the boxed-in carnage of films like The Raid and Dredd, as Frank powers through cramped hallways and stairwells in a renewed but no less frantic bid for survival. Green shoots the action with tactile clarity and a strong sense of geography, and the typical Marvel CG imagery is kept to a minimum (apart from one rubbery rooftop fall). As Frank shifts from pistol to shotgun to knife to, alarmingly, a pen, it’s hard to shake how right all this feels. One Last Kill could have taken the dramatically appealing route and tied the Punisher to his Netflix roots, as Born Again did for Daredevil. Instead, Green and Bernthal chose an approach akin to stumbling across a random but solid Marvel comic that becomes damn near impossible to put down.
What gives One Last Shot its oomph is how it portrays the new kind of antihero Frank Castle has become. We see this in a choice he makes late in the special, which speaks to his current psychological state. In years past, he’d have dragged Ma Gnucci from her limousine and painted the pavement with her brains without a second thought. Here, he chooses to rescue a young girl named Charli (Mila Jaymes) from the violence Ma has unleashed. Charli gives him a paper flower as thanks, which Frank leaves at his daughter’s grave—a disarmingly gentle image for a character so often defined by mutilation and rage, and perhaps the clearest indication yet that time is softening Frank’s hard edges. Ma Gnucci lives to seethe another day. But so does the Punisher, who enters this new era with a new target to guide his wrath. One batch, two batch, penny and dime. Welcome home, Frank.
Jarrod Jones is a contributor at The A.V. Club.
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