We Need To Talk About Punisher One Last Kill

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Punisher One Last Kill has arrived and it was a full octane blood-filled brutal non-stop action killing spree. Fans have been waiting for years for this level of punishing and I'll be damned if it wasn't a Disney Plus show that gave it to us. But I do have one major issue with this special that left me feeling a certain way come the final kill. Hey everybody, Colton here and I want to give you my thoughts on Punisher One Last Kill. I actually did a breakdown for the special over on Screen Crush that I hope you guys will check out, but I would love for you to stick around and listen to this review discussion as well because I'm going to dive into some things that we just didn't have time to get to in the breakdown. Now, before we actually got the special, I was very open about the fact that I was disappointed that it was going to be a special at all. Why not do a [ __ ] movie? You could make a Punisher movie for 50 million easy, and that is chump change compared to most Hollywood movie budgets, especially Marvel movies. You could have made a guaranteed profit with this movie by giving it another hour of runtime and a theatrical release and then you could dump it on Disney Plus or make it a miniseries. Hell, keep it a little TV movie special presentation thing, but just make it longer. That That is my critique. It It was way too short. You see, I liked each individual moment of this special so much that it pisses me off that it was all packaged in this half-baked random 40minute Disney Plus drop that honestly feels like a fan film. And when I say fan film, I mean that with all the respect in the world for fan films. But fan films get a certain level of grace given to them for the limitations that they have. There is no reason that this special should have felt limited. And I'm not arbitrarily saying, "Oh, this should have been longer. It needed to be an hour and a half. it needed to be 2 hours. No, there was a world where you could have done a 45minute Punisher special and it felt like, hey, 45 minutes was the right length. But for this story, that was not it. And it could have really benefited from being like an hour and a half to 2 hours.

[00:01:57]Don't get me wrong, please. Because the action in this thing was great. The cinematography was great. Burnernthal's performance was great. But I can't help but feel like this was something that Marvel didn't even really want to do.

[00:02:09]and they kind of just threw burnth all a bone saying, "Hey, we'll give you some money and a crew and a few weeks to make this little passion project that you pitched, but you need to keep it under an hour and in one location, and we're going to drop it on Disney Plus." I just feel like this special deserved better, especially with seeing what they were able to do with the very little time and resources they had. Now, I can sit here and complain about where I think it went wrong, but I think it would be better if I told you what it could have done to make everything right. I think this thing should have had scenes that showed us who the nuis were. Show us the bad ones and the terrible [ __ ] that they did. Show us the good one and his kind heart and innocence in it all. Show us mom, the mother of all these boys and her relationship with them and her relationship as the wife to the big guy and her struggling to teeter between raising a good boy and her youngest and hoping he'll take a different path, but also accepting the life of luxury that comes with her family's criminal empire.

[00:03:01]And then you cut into what Frank has been up to. have the news talking about what's going on with Mayor Kingpin and Daredevil and the AVTF rounding people up show Punisher watching this broadcast from his new apartment that he's holding up in in the Nucci neighborhood doing his surveillance and recon preparing to take down this whole family and we learn that hey that's what he is up to instead of being in the city helping Daredevil he's sitting right there seeing it on the news that there is a war taking place but instead he is solely focused on getting right back to his mission of hunting down the final crime family that was involved in the murder of his family. And then you show us instead of telling us Punisher infiltrating the neighborhood, studying the Nucci's daily moves and routines, the terrible things they do, and maybe the not so terrible things they do, give us some complexity to the characters, and then you have Punisher brutally murder them all. Then you have the fallout of the neighborhood collapsing, different families that we briefly met in the special, but in a featurelength film could have got to know a little more, so we'd feel all the more bad for them when the neighborhood collapses. You have all that chaos going on and then you have Mucci put a hit on Frank's head. Those hits go nowhere. So, she finally goes the route of the big attack on the entire apartment complex thinking that that is the only way that she'll be able to bring Frank down. And that would be a great parallel to Frank's actual history where Shuniver and Rawlings, they didn't try to send like one particular hitman to take out Frank. They got a big gang war to happen with Frank right in the middle hoping that he would die in the middle of it.

[00:04:31]And that's essentially what Manucci is having to do. She couldn't just send like one hitman to get him or, you know, something like that. No, she had to have massive chaos happening with Frank right in the middle of it, hoping that he would somehow get clipped. So anyway, the the special that we got, I think that's your second act of the film, that huge fight scene. And then in the third act, you have Frank coming to terms with him needing to embrace the skull. He will have just saved that poor family and let Ma get away in the process. And now he has one last kill, Ma Nucci. And then we can see Punisher go after her at her penthouse and give us yet another brutal fight sequence with Frank in his Punisher gear, fighting all of her guards. And then once he gets to Ma, we can have this emotional exchange between her and Frank, both being parents who lost their children and who now live in that grief. They're both also responsible for the death of each other's children. So they can talk about that. They can talk about the monsters they have both become following the death of their families and the blood that they now both have on their hands.

[00:05:33]And then ultimately you have Frank decide not to kill Ma because he knows all too well that the pain that he feels every day living with that grief of his dead family. He knows that that is a punishment far worse than death. So he leaves Ma alive to live in that grief.

[00:05:51]And then you have Frank leave the penthouse. Maybe he then meets up with Karen, the real Karen, not a vision, and he can learn about how Matt, you know, revealed himself to the world as Daredevil and he's now incarcerated. And then Frank, who has now redoned the skull and become the Punisher again, he could say that he's going to do what Karen has been asking him to do for the longest time and step up to the plate and partially fill the shoes of Daredevil and keep the city safe alongside characters like Jessica Jones, Luke Cage for Daredevil: Born Again season 3, and then of course, you guessed it, Spider-Man.

[00:06:22]>> Put your whip in.

[00:06:24]Suit yourself, >> mother.

[00:06:29]>> Go home.

[00:06:30]>> But hey, those are just my thoughts on the special. I I thought that everything in it was good, but the sheer fact that there was so much missing to make it actually work. It It just doesn't stick out to me as a a great special or anything. It It was just missing like twothirds of what needed to be in there for it to really hit. So, it it just overall it it felt a little empty. And I don't think that's Bernthal's fault necessarily because I'm sure that he would have liked to have had like a bigger budget and more time and an actual like longer run time. And I'm sure he would have loved for it to have been in theaters. I I think this is just kind of the best he could get for his passion project. And maybe he is hoping, as am I, that once people see this, and maybe Disney and Marvel see it, they will eventually perhaps greenlight a season 3 of The Punisher or maybe what we're all really hoping for, a full-blown Punisher movie. Thank you guys so much for watching. Be sure to check out my breakdown of The Punisher: One Last Kill over on Screen Crush. It's up right now. I will see you guys soon.

[00:07:35]I've been Colton Auburn. Thanks for watching. Bye.

[00:07:53]Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat.