Jon Bernthal’s Punisher Special Is Brutal, Beautiful, and Sets Up Spider-Man

Ten years in, Jon Bernthal is still the best thing to ever happen to Frank Castle. The Punisher: One Last Kill — Marvel Television’s latest Special Presentation, now streaming on Disney+ — is a brutal, blood-soaked 48-minute character study that finds the skull-wearing vigilante at his absolute lowest. It is, depending on who you ask, either his finest hour or a well-executed retread. Probably both.

The special opens with Frank in a state most Marvel heroes never get close to. His PTSD has consumed him. He’s haunted by hallucinations of his murdered family, of fallen Marine comrades, of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), of his old friend Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore, returning from the Netflix series). He’s been living in Brooklyn, locked inside his apartment while Little Sicily descends into chaos around him — a power vacuum created by his own hand after he methodically wiped out the Gnucci crime family, the last mob connected to his family’s murders. Mission accomplished. Purpose: gone. And for a man who has been defined entirely by vengeance, peace turns out to be its own kind of nightmare.

“We’re really honing in on him kind of at his end, when he doesn’t know what to do and he’s completely sort of enveloped in hopelessness,” Bernthal told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s kind of the place where this piece picks up.”

It is, as Bernthal describes it in a conversation with Esquire, a story about what happens to special forces veterans when their purpose slips away — a battle, he says, that too often ends in suicide. “You cut ties with every pillar of belief, whether it’s religion, whether it’s the Marine Corps, whether it’s your family,” he said. “Basically anything that was important to you, you start to see as a corruption. You look at yourself as the reasons for the problems in the world around you, and 99 percent of the time it results in suicide.” Dark material for a Disney+ platform that also hosts Bluey and Grogu. Marvel doesn’t care. Neither does Bernthal.

Ma Gnucci Arrives — and Everything Goes to Hell

Just as Frank is staring into the void, Ma Gnucci shows up to push him in. Played by Judith Light — yes, that Judith Light, of Who’s the Boss? and Ugly Betty and Poker Face — the wheelchair-bound matriarch of the surviving Gnucci family confronts Frank with a venomous clarity that briefly turns the special into something almost campy. “A small bounty on your head is all it took,” she tells him. “Every madman, crook, and killer in this neighborhood all worked for us, Frank. And now they’re desperate. I’m the one doing the punishing now.”

Her youngest son Carlo was killed at 6:47 p.m. — a time burned into her memory like a wound. So she publishes Frank’s address to go live at exactly 6:47, inviting every desperate criminal in Little Sicily to collect. Sharp-eyed comics fans will note the number: 647 was the final issue of the Brand New Day comic run in 2010, which then marked the beginning of a new era for Spider-Man. Given that Frank’s next MCU appearance is in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that’s a very deliberate wink.

What follows is the most sustained, unapologetically brutal action sequence Marvel has ever put on screen. Stripped of his armor and weapons, Frank improvises — fighting floor by floor through his apartment building as professional assassins, street thugs, and ski-mask-wearing nobodies flood the halls armed with axes, machetes, modified machine guns, and sheer desperation. Multiple reviews have compared it to The Raid. There’s also more than a little John Wick in the DNA, plus a gaming-influenced quality to the way Frank cycles through weapons looted off the fallen. He survives a gasoline immolation, a rooftop plummet, and at least one memorably horrifying encounter involving a ballpoint pen. The kill count is, conservatively, somewhere between 30 and 40.

The special’s entire second act — roughly 20 of its 45 story minutes — is this siege. And it works, largely because Bernthal makes you feel the cost of every single one of those kills. He’s not triumphant. He’s desperate. He’s grieving at full sprint.

What the Ending Actually Means

When the dust settles, Frank faces a choice: pursue Ma Gnucci as she drives away, or save deli worker Dre (Andre Royo, The Wire) and his family, who are caught in the crossfire. He chooses the family. Dre’s young daughter Charli (Mila Jaymes) hands him a flower in the aftermath — a small, almost unbearably earnest gesture. Frank later leaves that flower on his daughter’s grave.

It’s heavy-handed, yes. But it lands, because Bernthal earns it. The moment reframes Frank’s entire war: it was never purely about revenge. It was always, at its core, about protecting people who can’t protect themselves. He just forgot that for a while.

Back in his skull vest, Frank then tracks down a hood who killed a fellow veteran’s dog in the special’s opening minutes and deals with him accordingly. He has renewed purpose. He’s ready for whatever comes next.

What comes next is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in theaters July 31. Trailers show Frank apparently acting as a protector for Sadie Sink’s still-mysterious character — and the version of Frank we leave at the end of One Last Kill is exactly the kind of man who could take on that role. Not a serial killer running out his cooling-off period. A street-level guardian with a brutal code: good guys live, bad guys die. That’s a Frank Castle who can, theoretically, share a scene with Peter Parker.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green confirmed to MovieWeb that the special takes place after Frank’s escape from Wilson Fisk’s Red Hook prison at the end of Daredevil: Born Again Season 1, and before the events of Brand New Day — with some events running concurrently alongside Born Again Season 2. Notably, the special doesn’t explain why Frank sat out the fight against Mayor Fisk and the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, which is a genuine plot hole several critics have flagged. That thread appears to have been quietly dropped.

The Title Is a Misdirect — On Purpose

Green addressed the head-scratcher of a title directly. “I think it’s one of those situations where you hear it, you’re like, ‘Wait, is this the end of The Punisher?’” he told The Direct. “And when you realize that maybe it’s not, I think that makes it even more cool. It’s a misdirect in the best way.” There is no post-credits scene — the story ends, a title card appears, and that’s it. But the door is conspicuously wide open.

Green and Bernthal have already made clear they want more. “Jon and I would love to make a movie, something that could go worldwide and be on screens everywhere,” Green told The Direct. “But, obviously, that’ll be Marvel’s decision.” Bernthal was equally direct in Esquire: “I’m really down to keep doing more. But I think I have to be the one that’s making it.”

Bernthal Is Magnificent. The Special? Depends Who You Ask.

The critical consensus on One Last Kill is fascinatingly split — not on Bernthal, who everyone agrees is doing career-best work here, but on whether the special needed to exist at all.

Fans who love the character are going to be in heaven. The violence is real, the emotion is real, and Bernthal’s performance in the opening act — as Frank succumbs to his PTSD in an apartment that feels like the inside of his skull — is the kind of acting that doesn’t usually show up in superhero properties. Variety called it a performance that “cements his Punisher as one of Marvel’s most singular.” Multiple reviewers compared the opening’s atmosphere to the beginning of Apocalypse Now.

The more pointed criticism is that this is essentially the same arc Frank already completed in The Punisher Season 2 on Netflix — a man rediscovering his humanity and his higher purpose after losing his way. One Last Kill hits the same emotional beats, arrives at the same conclusion, and leaves Frank in roughly the same place. For anyone who’s followed his story closely, that repetition is hard to ignore. The Wrap called it “more of a Punisher rehash than a refreshing new angle.” SlashFilm went further, calling it “inessential, forgettable, and, at worst, a cautionary tale of superhero stories that are never allowed to end.”

The supporting cast takes some hits too. Judith Light gets two real scenes and is compelling in both, but she’s badly underserved by the runtime. Ma Gnucci is set up as a hateful, fascinating mirror to Frank — two people destroyed by the same cycle of violence, coming at it from opposite sides — and then the special essentially forgets about her before the end. Her survival sets up a sequel beautifully, but it also leaves the special feeling like it’s missing a final act.

What nobody disputes is the craft. Green, who previously directed King Richard and We Own This City (his third collaboration with Bernthal), brings genuine cinematic weight to a Disney+ production. The action sequences are grimy and desperate in a way that feels deliberately distinct from the choreographed hallway fights of the Netflix era. There’s a needle drop of Louis Armstrong’s “La Vie En Rose” over Frank fighting while literally on fire that is, as one reviewer put it, not exactly high art — but absolutely joyful.

The special was built with real input from veterans. Bernthal consulted closely with Marine Raiders Nick Koumalatsos and Cody Alford, and Green Beret Colton Hill — all three of whom were cast in the special as well. “Think about what they go through when they come home from war,” Green told D23. “That was helpful for us in terms of understanding the character and where he’s coming from.”

Marvel TV boss Brad Winderbaum, who revealed the idea for the special came together during production on Born Again, put it simply: “Bernthal is a generational actor. He knows the character inside and out. The idea that he’s in the MCU and can bring that to the greater universe, especially the more grounded street-level stuff, is a huge opportunity and, as a fan, the greatest thing ever.”

That much is inarguable. Whatever you think of the story, there is no version of Frank Castle — not Thomas Jane, not Dolph Lundgren, not Ray Stevenson — who hits like Jon Bernthal hits. When he’s standing over his family’s graves at the end of One Last Kill, flower in hand, the skull vest back on, the war back on — you believe every single second of it.

The Punisher: One Last Kill is streaming now on Disney+. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens July 31.