“The Punisher: One Last Kill” (2026) is a forty-eight-minute Marvel Television Special Presentation and Disney+’s first stab at ceding center stage to the titular vigilante. While battling hallucinations and the past, Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal, who also cowrote this special) gradually realizes that his neighborhood is under attack and finds the will to keep on living. He fights for those who cannot defend themselves, and The Punisher is back. This summary is generous. It is a reboot that no one needed with an unnecessary recap for people who apparently have never heard about the Punisher but are interested for inexplicable reasons. This episode is what happens when actors start writing out the gate. No story. Only brutality. The video game viewers will love this crap.
“The Punisher: One Last Kill” is disappointing for anyone who followed the Punisher’s rise from Netflix’s “Daredevil” (2016) season two, the two seasons of Netflix’s “The Punisher,” and “Daredevil: Born Again” (2025) season one episodes four and nine. When and where does this episode fit in this world? It is not as if Frank has been gone for a long time. He had a perfectly good story resisting Mayor Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and beating up the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (“AVTF”). When he did not appear in Season 2 of “Daredevil: Born Again,” his absence did not make sense, especially how personally offended he was that the AVTF originally styled themselves after him. If this special explains what he has been up to, then it makes less sense than ever. Please let this Punisher be from a different timeline in the multiverse because it recycles his earlier storylines and treats New York like a war zone. Is this New York without Fisk and AVTF? Maybe?
The special is set in Little Sicily, which is supposed to be located where? Unsure. It is probably supposed to be Little Italy. Before the crap hits the fan, “The Punisher: One Last Kill” makes the neighborhood seem really ugly with a dog death in the beginning and random violence against wholesome neighborhood people of color., including a homeless veteran (John Douglas Thompson). Exploitation called and asked for a skosh more subtlety. Frank has a neighbor, Isaiah’s mom (Evelyn O. Vaccaro), and Isaiah (Rafael R. Green), her little boy. Dre (great and wasted character actor Andre Ryo) and Debbie (Mugga) run the coffee shop on the corner with their daughter, Charli (Mila Jaymes), hanging out before and after school. Everyone else is a phantom or a thug, and considering that Frank is an unreliable narrator, all the daytime chaos in the streets seems like a delusion, but it is real. The Punisher always comes with violence, but senseless? Even on its worst day, it did not feel like it. Here is a public service announcement: Manhattan at its worst in the Seventies and Eighties was not like this. It is fiction, and not good one. It feels as if Fox, not Disney+, platformed this special.
Judith Light with a brunette wig drops in to deliver the most dialogue, which reveals a semblance of a story before she walks away with the title of most interesting character tucked away under her arm. If Light was not the bomb dot com, it would be challenging to introduce a new character and sympathize with their past as if it was tragic, not well deserved. She could come back and recite the phone book with everyone riveted and hanging on every word, including Frank.
Who am I to know more than Bernthal about a character whom he has played for a decade? Frank has always been a deeply messed up person who has flashes where he feels safe and engages with children. While Frank will never get over the loss of his family, he is a social person who makes connections and has not been this close to the edge for awhile. Even in his last two appearances in “Daredevil: Born Again,” he has a way of speaking that is recognizable if you talk to certain guys who have a way with words without the education to explain that rough poetry. He could go toe to toe with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in a debate and come out on top. It is one of many reasons to love Frank. You would hang out with him then remember that he is gonzo before the night ended but probably wave it off if you were on his right side, “But that is Frank!” What triggered this ape man regression?
Bernthal and cowriter and director Reinaldo Marcus Green reduce Frank to the broad strokes: grunting, yelling and fighting. Bernthal is a hot man, especially in “The Accountant 2” (2025), and he tones it down for Frank. He sticks us with a beard that would belong deep into a season of “Survivor.” We cannot even have that. It definitely feels like rebranding for the vigilante: bulkier, hairier and gruffer. Watching a season of this guy could be an unwanted chore. Even with his hallucinations of people from his past, the dialogue does nothing to move the character forward. Why in the world did they throw out a three-dimensional character who was evolving into a complex vigilante that could not be dismissed as bad, but was never good yet somehow worth trusting?
Green is better known as a director than a writer. He only penned “Monsters and Men” (2018) and “Bob Marley: One Love” (2024), which he also directed, before “The Punisher: One Last Kill,” and that trajectory is abysmal, but likely more lucrative. Even at the top of his game with “Monsters and Men,” his work has always had a mealy mouthed, compromising quality, and it brings me no joy to write that since I have been following his career and rooting for him. Green also directed “Joe Bell” (2020) and “King Richard” (2021), which Bernthal appeared in. Green is a functional director, a gun for hire who will give the client what they want, but not necessarily what the audience wants or what the work needs. Green has never been able to cultivate ecstasy, which is an emotion innate with being a fan of realizing a comic book figure into live action, or convey magical realism, which is required to depict Frank’s state of mind. While the sheer choreography, effort and energy devoted to the fight scenes are impressive, it lacks poetry.
People will probably leave happy because they just want to see Bernthal wear the comic appropriate outfit, but “The Punisher: One Last Kill” is a step back to the weakest era, Season 1 of Netflix’s “The Punisher,” which is comparatively Shakespearean. It is especially frustrating because Disney+ already stuck the landing on this character so why bin it? So is this the guy to expect in the upcoming “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” (2026). This amuse-bouche did not make a good first impression and is the first time that the MCU seems to have lost the plot without any trace of preserving even its most recent accomplishments. It is possible to be brutal and continue character development from “Daredevil: Born Again.”
