TV review: 'The Punisher: One Last Kill' balances violence, sadness
by Fred Topel · UPILOS ANGELES, May 12 (UPI) -- The Punisher: One Last Kill, on Disney+ Tuesday, is a faithful continuation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe iteration of the character. It is somber, violent and gratuitous all in under an hour.
Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) is haunted by the voices of his dead wife and child, his Marine comrades and other MCU cameos. He walks by violence on the streets of Little Sicily in a detached daze.
He only acknowledges the world when Ma Gnucci (Judith Light) calls his name. Castle has killed the Gnucci crime family, beginning in the Netflix series, but made the mistake of leaving her alive.
All of this is to set up a 12-minute action climax when Ma calls all the goons in the city to Castle's apartment building. In a reverse The Raid, Castle fights his way out rather than up the building.
It is an impressive sequence full of brutal stunt choreography. There is plenty of blood spatter on Disney+, though it still often cuts away from many of the most gruesome finishing moves.
A skinhead coughing blood into his own eye is a nice touch. For the record, it's at least 30-40 last kills.
Castle rescues as many of his neighbors as he can while the criminals invade the building. The introduction to the episode also made clear that these are hateful thugs beyond redemption for assaulting unhoused people and animals.
Still, it feels a little gross to relish in this level of violence committed by The Punisher, given the way his symbol has been adopted by perpetrators of real-life violence. This is the question the comic books always wrestled with, and the 2008 film Punisher: War Zone took it to a gleefully absurd extreme.
Prior to the siege, One Last Kill wrestles with it too. With the Gnucci family dead, Castle has resolved the mafia family that killed his own family, and other small time crime is not worth it to him.
He has reached a melancholy end to the road, and there could be no other. The cycle of violence does not come around to peace.
The script, written by Bernthal and director Reinaldo Marcus Green, includes both extremes of Castle's situation. It's not a spoiler to suggest crime still exists after Castle is finished, which is the ultimate hopelessness of his endeavor.
Francois Truffaut said "there is no such thing as an anti-war film" fearing that any depiction of war inevitably glamorizes it. Still, there have been great war films and great crime/revenge films so it's not fair to pin everything on one Punisher special.
The Punisher has been going for over 50 years in comics and speaks to a desire for justice and retribution in systems that often feel insufficient. Far from the only antihero character, One Last Kill faithfully draws The Punisher back into action.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.