A familiar but nomadic presence on the small screen for a decade's worth of television, Jon Bernthal's take on Marvel Comics' most notorious, murderous anti-hero Frank 'The Punisher' Castle has pushed the limits of how far so-called heroes can go in pursuit of justice.
Initially an antagonist for Netflix's Daredevil in the horned vigilante's second season, the battle for the soul of Frank Castle launched its own two-season run on the platform in 2017, giving fans the most fleshed-out Punisher experience imaginable, and platforming Bernthal as one of the leading tough guys of his generation.
A creative overhaul of the Daredevil universe at Disney+ gave a fresh opportunity for Bernthal to return, albeit in slightly more truncated form; his intermittent appearance in Daredevil: Born Again painted a more grizzled portrait of Castle, last seen caged and attempting a brutal prison break by bashing a fascist ICE-like agent's head to bits. This summer, he's returning in the decidedly more family-friendly Spider-Man: Brand New Day, his violence curbed and language censored by Peter Parker's web-slinging.
Pray tell, then, how does Frank get from here to there in such a short span of time? Reinaldo Marcus Green's new 'Marvel Television Special Presentation', The Punisher: One Last Kill seeks to bridge that gap with the understatement of the century, because, what, this guy has just ONE last kill left in him? Sure, Frank, sure...
We catch up with Frank in a classic situation: laying low, doing pull-ups, seeing ghosts, et cetera. Familiar faces haunting his waking life range from ex-comrade/therapist Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore) to his dead daughter Lisa (Bernthal's own kid, Addie), appearing and disappearing in moments of frenzied torment. Outside his miserable apartment in Little Sicily, the streets are rife with wanton cruelty and crime; hold-ups at the local diner are a regular occurrence, and friendly canine companions get snatched from their human's arms and thrown into oncoming traffic.
It's all a bit grim, and an encounter with vengeful crime boss Ma Gnucci (Judith Light) makes things worse, putting a price on Frank's head and calling all the bloodthirsty ne'er-do-wells to his building to get it. Thinking fast and grabbing the nearest blunt weapon he can, Frank disappears and The Punisher returns for, no, not quite one last kill, but for as many as it will take to clean up the whole sordid neighbourhood.
Boasting what has to be a record-breaking body count for such a short runtime (we cut to black at 44 minutes), the relentless savagery of One Last Kill is something to behold. From the moment Castle's legs catch fire from a gasoline flash flood, there are no prisoners taken and no quarter given to anyone in his path, almost entirely snipping out dialogue in favour of grunting and screaming. The fracas keeps moving between flamed-out apartments, down gassy stairwells and off the side of multiple buildings, packing in a tremendous amount of action ideas in a clippy 15 minute set-piece, putting Bernthal through his paces as a trained killer and a pratfalling cartoon careering from one incident to the next.
Former Paul Thomas Anderson DoP Robert Elswit gets down and dirty with the chaos but never loses track of it, cleanly shooting the shooting with clarity and colour. From a visual standpoint, this is a refreshingly vibrant-looking work after two murky seasons of Daredevil: Born Again, where sources of light were only glimpsed through lens flares or muzzle flashes; Elswit keeps it bright and lurid, like Do the Right Thing if it were helmed by John Woo.
And what a great concept too! A remake of Death Wish 3 with the frenetic energy of The Raid sounds like the perfect lizard-brained outing for Bernthal's first solo appearance as The Punisher in seven years, reintroducing a controversial and ruthless comic book character as a solid foil for more virtuous heroes going forward. It's just unfortunate that all the measurements are way, way off.
Working from a script co-written by Bernthal himself, there's a monotonous tendency to repeat what we've already seen. Bernthal clearly has been inside Frank Castle's head for long enough to know it's a dark, tortured place, and his social isolation and disturbing visions have been central to his audience's empathy toward him. But going over this...again? In laying the groundwork for the reawakening of The Punisher, there's the distinct and unpleasant whiff of reheated nachos, only now ready for consumption with less dramatic heft and extra shavings of cliché.
A montage showing how The Punisher's past rebalances the scales against him also muddies the waters. In losing her reprobate sons to Frank's vengeance, Ma Gnucci's backstory deals in some rather hideous imagery, at one point showing the worst of the litter's death with The Punisher's knee on his throat, blocking his windpipe against the NYC pavement. Anyone with a social conscience will immediately recognise this as a very political image of our horrible times, directly and certainly irresponsibly referencing the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin.
Using that kind of rhetoric in a story that eventually pushes the idea of The Punisher back to a triumphant version of the character is inescapably wrongheaded. Frank Castle's absolute morality surrounding protecting the innocent is carefully assembled from the beginning; One Last Kill's vision of a New York overrun with psychotics and anti-social horrors from the start, and the sort of thing that even Lloyd Kaufman might have thought twice about bringing to the screen in a Toxic Avenger picture. Under pressure, Castle's reaction to society's ills is seen as a flaming sword of righteous justice, swift and merciless in its exacting justice, taking him out of a guilt-ridden stupor and putting him right back where he was last we saw him: kicking ass and taking names, vigilante-style and to terminal ends.
Its final image gives the fans what they want, sure. However, in its preceding 45 minutes, there's something graceless about The Punisher as a moral figure, reapplying the trauma already laid out and boxed up by many previous hours of television.
In the name of praising its central figure and making him into a (if you will) 'Friendly Neighborhood Punisher', Bernthal and Green completely lose sight of how complicated the theme of justice through wanton murder really is, painting a world so absurdly cruel that the only way to solve it is through the same cruelty, only now made more palatable for those at the back that didn't quite hear it the first time.
Being able to enjoy something as base in its pleasures as this proves to be a tough uphill battle through its icky politics and tired storytelling, perhaps making it a better idea for Castle to hang up the Colt for good.
The film is now streaming worldwide on Disney Plus.