The Punisher: One Last Kill

TV Series Review

Frank Castle has no one left to kill.

He ended them all. Everyone who had a hand in his family’s death is gone. The Gnucci crime syndicate has been wiped from Little Sicily, and Castle has had his revenge.

Perhaps he thought it’d be more satisfying. Perhaps he imagined that his late wife (Maria) and his two children (Frank Jr. and Lisa) would somehow let him know they were happy. That he’d done good.

But the ghosts from his past give him no peace. And without the Gnuccis, Little Sicily’s just as tortured. Assault, robbery and murder take place every day on its streets. The gutters seem to run full with tears and blood.

Castle pays it no mind. He’s done. He has one last bullet to use, one last kill to make: His own.

But as he sits by his daughter’s grave, she stands before him. “You OK, Daddy?” she asks.

And then she’s gone—just like all the other ghosts who haunt him.

But it’s enough, just enough, to stay the trigger. Castle goes home and discovers a woman waiting for him, dressed in black and trapped in a wheelchair.

She lost her family, just like Castle did.

Only hers? Castle killed them all. Every last one. Ma Gnucci watched the last one die. Watched as Castle stomped his face into the curb.

She spits in Castle’s face. She tells him about the bounty she placed on his head. All the desperate goons of Little Sicily are after him. “They will come, and they will kill you, and they will kill anything that gets in their way,” she says. “You made your bed. Rot in it.”

No Rest for the Wicked

The Punisher has always been a difficult “superhero” for me to navigate. I’m all for internal conflict and character complexity. But Castle’s blood-drenched, revenge-riddled storylines feel a far cry from the superheroes to which I am drawn.

As such, Disney+’s hour-long, one-off special The Punisher: One Last Kill feels both better and worse.

On the positive side, the story leans into the ultimate emptiness of Castle’s crusades.

Yes, Castle killed every male member of the Gnucci family—but the vacuum left in their wake is filled with chaos and blood. “You can say what you thought about the Gnuccis, but at least they kept it peaceful,” a resident of Little Sicily says.

Castle initially walks through this wasteland—one that he unintentionally helped create—like a zombie, unwilling to help. He’s filled with his own chaos: Ghosts insult and berate him. Guilt pounds him mercilessly. He achieved his ultimate end, and what did it give him? Nothing. Just, as Ma Gnucci tells him, a raw hunger impossible to sate.

Revenge and hate, One Last Kill suggests, leads to just more revenge and hate.

Jon Bernthal, who has played The Punisher in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wrote One Last Kill. And he talked with Entertainment Weekly about the special’s aims.

“The story that we’ve laid out is, I think, really special,” Bernthal said. “It’s the visceral, psychologically complex, unforgiving, no-holds-barred version of Frank where he’s going to turn his back to the audience. And nothing is easy and all violence has a cost, and we’re going to see that cost.”

We indeed see that cost in Castle. And that comes with its own cost for viewers.

Punishing

One Last Kill is indeed unforgiving—the most graphic MCU product I’ve seen.

The violence, of course, is extreme. Scores of people are killed here: We watch one man stabbed repeatedly in the arms, the chest, the neck, the face. People are dispatched with fire axes and high explosives. Throats are cut. About the only time that the camera turns away is when Castle smashes a Gnucci skull on the pavement.

And that’s just the damage that Castle does. His opponents are unapologetically barbaric, beating innocent civilians and setting fire to their apartments. One goon takes someone’s dog and throws it into an oncoming garbage truck. In the background, we see women slapped and attacked, families torn apart and brutalized. In a dream-like sequence, we see Castle’s children, injured and bleeding. The special’s last 30 minutes is practically a non-stop, blood-soaked riot.

You’d think that the show wouldn’t have enough time to engage in any other content issues—but you’d be wrong. In flashback, we see the licentious behavior of the Gnuccis: The family’s paterfamilias smooches and squeezes several bikini-clad lovers poolside before he’s executed via a bullet to the head. (His wife is amazed that no one killed him earlier.) One of his sons engages in oral sex with a woman in lingerie before he, too, is killed. The youngest Gnucci, Carlo, could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes. We don’t see him engaged in any sexual act, but Ma Gnucci insists that “He never touched a single one of those kids,” indicating the man was accused of acts of pedophilia. (Castle and several other guys run around shirtless, too.) Characters drink, and Castle vomits into a bucket.

Shut your eyes to it all, and there’s still no relief. We hear nearly 20 f-words and at least half a dozen s-words, along with a handful of other profanities.

We could go on, but hopefully we don’t need to. Moreover, One Last Kill ultimately undercuts its own premise. Wholesale slaughter for revenge is pathetic, the show suggests. But slaughter in the service of others? Why, that sure is satisfying.

That satisfaction of seeing the bad guys burble out their lives in pools of their own blood has always been the appeal of characters like The Punisher. We long to see the evil suffer. It feels good. But Christians should know there are better ways forward.