ONE LAST KILL: PTSD fuels Marvel Television’s brutal PUNISHER ‘movie’…
Frank Castle’s family was wiped out as collateral damage by the mob and ever since he’s been using his particular set of skills to brutally pay-back against the villains of New York City. It brought him into both conflict and alliances with fellow vigilantes like Daredevil, but few share his compulsion to go to any means necessary.
Weeks ago the Gnucci family were systematically killed, a last link to Castle’s tragic past and many believe that it was also the final act of ‘the Punisher’. Either way, a haunted and desolate Castle believes the world no longer has any place for him and decides to end it all.
However, there’s one member of the Gnuccis left and she’s also stop at nothing for revenge. If she has to tear up a neighbourhood already tearing itself apart so be it.
There’s a bounty on Frank’s head and time is running out…
Punisher: One Last Kill is something of a strange animal, though one that appears to have been chained up, abused and remains distinctly feral – bristling, flinching and lashing out at every sudden movement. Not so much biting the hand that feeds it as ripping it off.
Watching the latest Marvel television movie, surely it’s most ‘mature audiences only’ vehicle to date, certainly its most violent of the Disney+ era, it feels like less a one-off special and more the first episode of a show that wants to raise (or lower) the bar on nihilistic brutality. Just when you think it’s a statement of intent and you’re interested to see how this saga of tragedy will develop, it finishes and you’re left looking at your watch to check you’re not mistaken…. yes, this is a singular entry that hasn’t even reached the fifty-minute mark and not an opening salvo…
Coming across as a testosterone-fueled mix of Call of Duty and The Raid it makes the recent two series of Daredevil feel positively restrained by comparison. It’s an unforgiving, unrelentingly bleak chapter in Marvel‘s street-level universe that starts with chaos and carnage on those streets street – a neighbourhood tearing itself and its citizens apart in broad daylight. A veteran-turned-vagrant is assaulted by a gang, his dog is thrown under a bus and a wild-eyed man with a club slouches around looking for medication and something to hit as police-cars drift by, probably in vain hope of only finding a cat stuck up a tree. It’s a statement about the state of things populated by over-the-top examples, or more accurately overkill. Literally.
It’s exact place in the timeline is unclear – perhaps the Marvel heroes are stuck fighting a multiverse of Doom-laden madness, maybe Daredevil is still stuck in a battle of mutually assured destruction with Wilson Fisk – maybe neither event has happened yet or both. But it’s clear no latex-suited mutants or avenging angels are coming to help. And what of Frank Castle, the self-styled Punisher who – the headlines scream – just took out most members of the final crime family linked to the murder of his wife and child? Well, he’s sitting in a barren room, the ghosts of his past surrounding and taunting him and with a decision made that his journey of vengeance is now over. He has no time to help his neighbours… he’s locked away his bigger weapons and has a date in the cemetery and the graves of his family…with one bullet in his gun left to use on himself.
Fate has other plans.
So far, the story is a surreal, unsettling journey through full-blown PTSD, an experience that isn’t really ‘fun‘ to watch but is nothing short of an intensely choreographed car-crash from which you can’t look away. The story then has to decide whether it is one of redemption or pure retribution and its decision to play to both (while certainly leaning more into the latter) produces a mixed bag of results that largely depend on what you want from it.
Jon Bernthal is undoubtedly a tour de force. With limited dialogue (seriously, I doubt he says more than a hundred words throughout), Bernthal brings a pathos to match the punishment and is worth the price of admission / subscription fee alone. He’s a very good actor, often playing physically-imposing and compromised figures (think Shane in early episodes of The Walking Dead and Ben Affleck’s brother in The Accountant movies for starters), but he has greater range and the close-ups of his face showing the pain and history of the character allow the actor to own the screen. As a fan of the character and fully invested in the production, he’s also a force behind the penning of the story as well.
When not framing lonely tenement silhouettes and ghetto grand-guignol detritus, director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard, We Own this City) keeps the action breathlessly moving along hallways, streets and a collection of close-combat locations. (There’s been talk of one dodgy VFX during a rooftop fall, but apart from that, the effects are often more practical). There’s little time for bullet-ballets, though, at times, it veers close to aggressive video-game vignettes – (where the collateral damage is given as little thought as background pixels) there’s certainly a sense of real pain as legs are broken, arms are bent, skulls are smashed and knives find the most convenient (or inconvenient) arteries.
His tragic history and Daredevil appearances garnered the character some sympathy (there’s a cameo from Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page as linkage) but here the extended tragedy is of a man who actively wanted to put the past behind him but is dragged back unwillingly to his unpleasant skill-set through the actions of another. Tony Award and Emmy Award winner Judith Light (now unrecognsiable as the female lead in Who’s the Boss?) plays an entirely different mother out to turn the world against Frank when her family is apparently slaughtered by him off-screen. (They were the aforementioned family linked to the Castle family deaths). She’s put a bounty on his head and now everyone seems to be after him and anyone who happens to get in his way and Frank is forced to choose between saving the people in the firing line or ending Ma Gnucci for good.
We’ll next see Frank Castle in this summer’s Spider-man movie and though we leave him in a fractionally better place at the end of One Last Kill, it’ll be hard to thread the needle with a throughlined audience, given that the webhead outing is for a family audience and this is anything but.
As entertainment it’s a mixed bag – some will love it, some will hate it for equally valid reasons. It’s a singular thread built on sheer momentum rather than a story, but something to leave you feeling awkward for enjoying some parts of it. However, as a study in PTSD, One Last Kill is as unflinchingly good as it is unpleasant to see, so much so you expect a mental helpline phone number to feature in the closing credits. The bottom line is that The Punisher and Frank Castle are the consequence of tragedy – and shouldn’t be seen as – ‘heroes’, something that Marvel has often stated (especially when some real-life police-officers started championing his ways). If this is a step towards being a hero, it’s going to be a very long journey and should be.
If there was any doubt of that, One Last Kill (or, more accurately, One Hundred + Kills and there’ll surely be more…) puts its finger on the scales of consequence to devastating effect…
8.5 / 10
Punisher: One Last Kill is now streaming on Netflix…