The Punisher: One Last Kill

“One batch, two batch. Penny and dime.”

I really, really wanted to like this. I love The Punisher. But I have absolutely no idea why this exists.

Daredevil: Born Again season one ended with Frank breaking out of an AVTF cage. It made it seem like his getting captured in the first place was part of his plan. Bring Frank into the heart of the operation so that he can more easily tear it out in a shower of bloody, bloody violence.

Because there was no way that he would just disappear… right? Especially not with the AVTF continuing to use his skull logo.

There’s no way that he wouldn’t just leave things with Fisk be when he knows that he’s literally locking people up in literal cages. He wouldn’t just escape without also making sure that everyone else got out… right?

If he’s completely missing from Daredevil: Born Again season two, then there has to be a really good reason for it!

… Right?

Yeah, there was literally none of that. I have no idea how Frank went from the man we saw in Born Again to the man we see here. It also retconned a good bit of continuity. How many times is Frank going to kill the “last” people who were responsible for his family’s murders? I thought that we already did this at the start of The Punisher, which is why Frank spent time as a construction worker. But now there’s more Gnuccis to kill?

Oh, and by killing these last male members of the Gnucci family, Little Sicily, in record time, automatically descended into the kind of dystopian hellscape that came right out of 2012’s Dredd. I actually wondered if the absurd level of violence was all a hallucination and a manifestation of Frank’s PTSD.

But no, it’s apparently real. And that’s before it flips into The Purge where a nigh endless wave of thugs and criminals decide to steal, rape, and murder literally everyone in front of them despite only Frank having a price on his head.

That’s the entirety of the plot. We spend the first twenty minutes with Frank suicidal and in the midst of a horrific PTSD episode, five minutes of Ma Gnucci giving a monologue that could have been campy fun but missed the mark, and then the last twenty minutes with Frank absolutely slaughtering everyone around him.

There is only one tone and one intensity: maximum overdrive and constant screaming. It is absolutely exhausting about ten minutes in. And it means that there is really nowhere for the energy to go. There’s nothing to build to because we’re already over the top.

The CGI was ridiculously bad in parts, especially when Frank fell off the roof. I know that Marvel can be spotty when it comes to this, but come on.

The editing was also very choppy, especially during the very extended fight scene that took up our entire Act three. I think that there were some interesting directing choices, but they were all undercut by whatever happened in the editing room.

The first half of the episode was stronger when it came to this. The long one-shot of Frank walking through the neighborhood was very well done. There were a lot of things happening in the background, and that could not have been easy to pull off.

Jon Bernthal did well. I really needed him to find a volume between screaming and whispering, but he definitely poured his heart into the performance. I can’t fault him for that aspect of it.

I can fault him for the writing, though, since he was the co-writer along with director Reinaldo Marcus Green. We spend the first section of the episode in a very dark, traumatized place with Frank. It’s unrelentingly bleak, and it’s also territory that we’ve covered several times before. How many times do we have to watch Frank go from “I’m done. There’s nothing left and no place for me” to “My purpose is violence and violence I shall unleash?” The tread on these narrative tires is beyond threadbare at this point.

Ma Gnucci also feels like she’s from a completely different show. She’s cheesy and campy and over the top, and it’s so discordant from what preceded it. She’s great. She breathed a bit of life into everything, and Judith Light devoured the scenery like it was nothing. I would not be upset if she returned elsewhere in the MCU.

It just didn’t work here.

Something else that didn’t work was Charli, the sweet daughter of a shopkeeper (because you have to be an innocent preteen girl if you want Frank Castle to care about you), giving Frank a paper rose to thank you for saving her. Mind you, this was after he horrifically, brutally murdered several people in front of her. She would not be all smiling and rushing to give him a present. She would be absolutely traumatized.

The violence was very bloody and varied. It certainly earned its TV-MA rating when it came to that. It might have been bloodier than the actual show. Either that, or the compressed run time just made it seem like it. There was an almost video game feeling to it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s probably the best way to stage an extended fight scene like this. And I do always like it when characters actually need to reload or loot the bodies of those they’ve killed instead of just having unlimited ammo.

There is also a fire stunt. Not the best one I’ve ever seen, a fire stunt is like pizza. There’s no such thing as a bad one.

And I guess that’s the stance that you can take here. If you don’t mind a completely disconnected 44 minutes of violence and trauma, then you’ll probably like this. It just did not do nearly enough to justify its existence for me.

Random Thoughts

A very upsetting thing happens to a very cute dog, named Cammo. While we don’t see all of it, we do hear it. It certainly sets the opening tone.

The hallucination of Karen is wearing the same jacket as the memories/hallucination of Maria.

It was nice to see Curtis again, even if he was only a hallucination, too.

Jon Bernthal’s actual daughter, Addie, played Lisa.

It kind of makes me laugh that Frank is always fixated on Lisa as opposed to Frank Jr. Losing his son obviously did not make the same impact on his psyche as it did losing his daughter.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.

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