In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max Rockatansky is haunted by visions. He sees ghosts in moments of adrenaline – when escaping from the War Boys through the tunnels of the Citadel – and he sees them in moments of stillness, such as the beginning of the film, looking over the desert controlled by Immortan Joe, and later as he watches Furiosa, the Many-Mothers, Nux, and the Wives begin their short-lived trek across the Salt.
The ghosts he sees are visceral sensations, exaggerated memories, glimpses of people from his past and horrific, tactile sensations of trauma, such as a few frames of skulls superimposed over the faces of people accusing him of allowing their deaths, or flashes of many hands gripping at him, somatic, corporeal manifestations.
These haunting visions are memorable because of how intense they are, but that intensity is matched by their brevity. Each vision is just a few frames long, enough to jolt the viewer but not enough to harm the pacing of the film. They happen between heartbeats, between impacts.
I was thinking of the visions in Fury Road while watching the new, hideous Punisher: One Last Kill Marvel Special Presentation. In it, Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) is depicted at his least lucid, a drastic and unexplained regression from his previous appearance in Daredevil: Born Again. In that show, Frank was a hermit, semi-retired as the Punisher. In One Last Kill, he is a hallucinating recluse deep in psychosis, imagining accusatory conversations with people from his life, both living and dead. His wife and daughter (and apparently also a son, who largely gets left behind in Frank Castle’s thoughts, a sort of second-child syndrome for the vengeful action hero) appear to question or accuse him, or to simply stand there idly. He sees a vision of Curtis, his friend from the marines, who – as far as I know, did not die in the previous Punisher seasons – and Karen Page, who reminded me of how good Deborah Ann Woll is in Daredevil.
The content of these apparitions’ dialogue is to gesture at some vague notions of guilt or failure. It is clear that One Last Kill is thinking of the Fury Road ghosts when conceptualizing Frank’s psyche, but the madness he exhibits is so out of nowhere. When we left him in the end of Daredevil: Born Again’s first season, he was on the verge of escaping from Wilson Fisk’s detention center from the Anti-Vigilante Task Force; neither Fisk’s mayoralty nor the Anti-Vigilante Task Force are mentioned in this special.
Fury Road is also by no means the only reference for One Last Kill. It is a brief, rapid-fire string of bits from other action and crime films.The Raid, Death Wish, Assault on Precinct 13 and the John Wick series loom large, the latter in particular. In its 51-minute runtime, it borrows heavily from many other action movies, executing on none of them particularly well.
As an actor, Bernthal has two kinds of performance: he can enter into a film and steal the scene with rugged humanity in his dialogue (Wind River, Sicario) or he can scream wild-eyed with an bestial intensity. What made previous Punisher projects successful was the opportunities he was given to switch between these appropriately, the clear-eyed killer who can argue his brutal philosophy with Daredevil, and the unstoppable force in action when the shooting starts. In One Last Kill, he is only afforded the second type, the harrowed, scarcely-intelligible screamer.
The setting for this special takes place in a New York City “Little Sicily” neighborhood that is born from the nightmares of Fox News-addled conservatives’ minds, a constant warzone of insane, random violence, where a walk from your building’s door to the corner store would have you witness multiple random stabbings, shootings, beatings, vandalism; a truly comical sequence of casual crime that is confusingly attributed via news broadcast to a power vacuum in the area’s organized crime caused by Frank Castle’s own vengeful killings. I’m pretty sure at one point I saw a woman set on fire in the background, totally unremarked upon.
This sort of urban terror which exists solely in the imagination of people who watch conservative news and it is utterly jarring to see it deployed at a time when violent crime is at historic lows, when the police and federal government are responsible for an immeasurably greater degree of public violence than any local gang of street-toughs.
One Last Kill is structured around two acts. In the first, Frank wanders around from his apartment, speaking and being spoken to by ghosts from his life. In the second, he is committed to nonstop violence until the final seconds of the Special. Neither are very good or interesting.
We start with some lunatics on a street killing a homeless veteran’s dog by throwing it into an oncoming truck, presumably as part of a grassroots campaign to make Escape From New York a reality. We meet Frank in an austere apartment, tearing down his wall of targets, having finally killed them all. Ostensibly, these were all people who in some way were partially responsible for the gang war that killed his family, even though season 1 of the Punisher revealed that this was actually a set-up by rogue CIA operatives to kill Frank in particular. Castle sees visions of his former Marine unit, visions of his friend Curtis, and his wife and children, and Karen Page, none of which reveal anything interesting or new about him. He tries to kill himself at his family’s graves, but sees a hallucination of his daughter, who convinces him not to. Day well spent, he returns home, only to be caught by Ma Gnucci, head of the Gnucci crime family, whose husband and sons were all killed by Frank.
For some reason, One Last Kill decides to rip off the weakest of the John Wick films and borrow the open season deadline from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Ma Gnucci tells Frank that since he killed one of her sons at 6:47pm, she put out a bounty on him that will go live at 6:47pm. Frank then proceeds to simply wait in his apartment until he is attacked. John Wick Chapter 3 used the impending deadline to build up the tension into a grand release as John raced across the city to retrieve all the services he can get before his is excommunicated and the bounty is opened. One Last Kill, greatly constrained for time, has about ninety seconds between Ma Gnucci’s explanation of the bounty and thugs setting fire to Frank’s door.
We are now in the second half, and unfortunately it is no better than the first, merely louder. Unlike the stylish, money-driven assassins in John Wick Chapter 3, the criminals in One Last Kill are directed at Frank with promise of an undefined reward, but seem much more driven by a pure love of chaos and violence. Nothing is directed at Frank in particular. The entire apartment building is swarming with masked gangsters, chasing at random neighbors who exist only to thank Frank for killing their attackers.
It is Assault on Precinct 13 but also The Raid, but also John Wick Chapter 3, but also a little of Extraction, and as thrilling as none of them. The action is rote – appropriately-armed bad guys rush in in evenly balanced groups that are always equivalently armed to Frank. When he has a gun, they happen to have guns, until he runs out of bullets, at which point they rush in with axes and baseball bats. Eventually someone runs in to deliver him a gun and get punched for it, and then the cycle repeats.
This whole sequence is clearly inspired by The Raid, which in of itself is value-neutral. Good action movies often borrow imagery and setpieces from others. But in The Raid: Redemption the contrivances of the plot result in a completely different affect. The apartment building that is the setting for The Raid is a dump, populated largely – but not exclusively – by the henchmen and dependents of the crime boss who owns the block. What makes Iko Uwais’ Rama the hero of The Raid is not just his martial arts mastery, but his belief in the goodness of others and the possibility of redemption. What does Frank Castle believe in? Ultimately, he believes that he lives in a world where Frank Castle should get thanked for murdering people, and he does.
Throughout this sequence, as the Punisher slaughters his way through what seemingly could be the result of some kind of rage virus or The Purge, all I could really think of was: is this supposed to be the same city that Spider-Man lives in?
With Bernthal’s Punisher appearing in the upcoming Spider-Man film, it does invite comparison. Superheroes as a genre demand justification for themselves. They fight crime, so their worlds must therefore be filled with the kinds of criminals that can be fought. But who their villains are is generally reflective of the culture. In the 30s and 40s, superheroes like Superman and Captain America fought the KKK and the Nazis. In this year’s Daredevil: Born Again season 2, the villains are the politicized police forces of a democratically-elected but irredeemably corrupt Wilson Fisk. The villains of superhero narratives are often representations of a social or civil ill such as corruption or bigotry, or a reflection of some element of the psyche, like how Peter Parker and the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man are each changed by their own alter egos.
But in One Last Kill, the wanton chaos of Frank’s attackers are not a manifestation of his own inner chaos – he becomes more grounded as he fights them, having no more time for his hallucinations, which cease as soon as the killing begins. The more he fights, the more he is recentered in reality, which makes the utter insanity of the mass hysteria going on in this neighborhood all the more insulting. It can only be read as a vindication of every sheltered, rural White American’s sensationalist fear about what urban life is. Don’t you just wish that someone like the Punisher, or someone with the Punisher’s logo would just go there and unload on all those hooligans in the street? No?
When Frank finally kills his way out of the apartment building, he is caught between going after Ma Gnucci and saving the family of the local bodega guy, who is also under attack for some reason. Frank saves the family because the bodega guy’s daughter reminds him of his own dead kid or kids. He kills them all in bloody, brutal ways, and after it’s over the daughter runs over and gives him a little hand-sewn heart. Thank you, Frank.
Then, at the end, we see Frank at his triumphant return to the Punisher persona – back in the saddle, with the spray-painted logo and the urban combat dress, he kills the guy from the beginning of the special who threw the dog into traffic. The credits music kicks in, we’re slammed with the logo, The End.
One Last Kill was Jon Bernthal’s project, conceived during the production of Daredevil: Born Again. The actor was also the executive producer and co-writer along with director Reinaldo Marcus Green. If this vision of Frank Castle is the limit of Bernthal’s imagination of the character – static in his insanity and dissociation, while simultaneously a necessary rejoinder to out-of-control crime to be timidly thanked by the victims of his victims – then perhaps it would have been better to leave him caged in the ending of a better show.