Trailer The Punisher: One Last Kill | Official Trailer

[Ryujin]

Watched it last night. It was kinda pointless. It didn't move the character forward in any significant way. It was like it was intentionally trying to be a more brutal (arguably) but much less well choreographed John Wick, with an even thinner plot: Punisher has unusually bad day, even by Punisher standards, and Punisher subsequently kills a bunch of nameless criminals. Okay. What's one thing we know about Punisher now that we didn't know before watching this?

To me it feels like this is the moment that Castle goes from being focused solely on revenge for his family, to making life better for innocents.

And yeah, it's set in a fantasy New York where emergency services basically don't exist until the plot requires them, and then it's back to normal. It also really begged credulity that the shopkeeper was trying to keep business going as usual throughout the day.

The character and the actor both deserve better.

I don't know if I can agree that the actor deserves better when he has both a writer and producer credit for it

 

[Willie the Duck]

What about cocaine?

That's usually reserved for the writer's room. Character himself gets limited to manliness-coded brown* alcohols.
*or tequila, if set in the southwest

 

[Stalker0]

My lingering thoughts:

*I really did not appreciate the dog being killed at the beginning. Frank let the dog killer off too easy at the end.

Well Frank didn't know the guy killed a dog, he just knows that he deserves punishment.

*Why was Curtis a ghost? Did he die off-screen?

Not necessarily. We also saw visions of Karen. Basically its the thoughts on Frank's heads haunting him.

*Why was Frank letting the neighborhood descend into chaos? He normally doesn’t like to see innocent people suffer.

Because he is royally messed up right now. That's the entire point of that scene. Frank is normally a guy that gives a crap and steps up when he sees things going down. The fact he didn't in that case is meant to tell you just how messed up he is.

*It felt like there were way too many goons in that apartment building. Where’d they all get assault rifles and the like?

Ma Gnucci called them in from all over, and its not weird for a lot of gang members and hit guys to have weapons.

*It just felt gratuitously violent for no real purpose.

Just like Frank, violence with no purpose.

*The whole bit with his family while he was at their graves was weird.

*Why did he knock all the stuff off his family’s tombstones at the end?

He was cleaning the tombstombs, a common thing people do when they visit dead loved ones.

So much of it just made so little sense, and it felt very out of character compared to how Jon Bernthal has played Frank previously. (I note that he co-wrote this special.)

No it actually makes PERFECT sense. Because this was always the end of the road for Frank. Its the classic message, Vengenance does not heal your soul.

Frank had "finally" taken out all the people that were even halfway involved with his family's death. He had gone through the entire roster. And so now he's just stuck, he's sitting there in his pain and grief with no purpose to drive him, nothing to distract him. Just the demons of his past tormenting him. And I want to say Jon Bernthal did some amazing acting in those scenes.

this is actually not uncommon. You take some tortured men and you give them a purpose, and there a wrecking ball. But once the party stops, with nothing left to do and distract, they just break in half.

 

[Stalker0]

To me it feels like this is the moment that Castle goes from being focused solely on revenge for his family, to making life better for innocents.

That's my take as well. Frank exhausted his previous purpose of vengeance. Now he has found a new purpose in helping (or at least avenging) other people.

 

[chuckdee]

He was cleaning the tombstombs, a common thing people do when they visit dead loved ones.

I took it as he was cleaning off the trophies of a past life, and starting anew. Which was the reason he replaced it with the gift the little girl had given him. He had a new purpose.

 

[Ryujin]

Not necessarily. We also saw visions of Karen. Basically its the thoughts on Frank's heads haunting him.

Same but I read it as a psychotic break, rather than just seeing his thoughts.

 

[timbannock]

Well Frank didn't know the guy killed a dog, he just knows that he deserves punishment.

Not necessarily. We also saw visions of Karen. Basically its the thoughts on Frank's heads haunting him.

Because he is royally messed up right now. That's the entire point of that scene. Frank is normally a guy that gives a crap and steps up when he sees things going down. The fact he didn't in that case is meant to tell you just how messed up he is.

Ma Gnucci called them in from all over, and its not weird for a lot of gang members and hit guys to have weapons.

Just like Frank, violence with no purpose.

He was cleaning the tombstombs, a common thing people do when they visit dead loved ones.

No it actually makes PERFECT sense. Because this was always the end of the road for Frank. Its the classic message, Vengenance does not heal your soul.

Frank had "finally" taken out all the people that were even halfway involved with his family's death. He had gone through the entire roster. And so now he's just stuck, he's sitting there in his pain and grief with no purpose to drive him, nothing to distract him. Just the demons of his past tormenting him. And I want to say Jon Bernthal did some amazing acting in those scenes.

this is actually not uncommon. You take some tortured men and you give them a purpose, and there a wrecking ball. But once the party stops, with nothing left to do and distract, they just break in half.

My take as well. This was basically "What if 'Blue Ruin', but for Frank Castle."

The bad: This was obviously ultra-low budget, and the final action sequence shows this in a lot of ways. It should've been more like the apartment fight in Extraction, not the conclusion of Raw Deal.

The good: This was absolutely laser-focused on telling us why "Frank" is just a name from a forgotten life now, and "The Punisher" is who this guy now is, full-time.

My sincere hope: That we eventually get Punisher on the big-screen in War Machine armor with the skull painted on it. Not for any reason connected to this show, but simply because I love that idea and want to see it explored more fully than it was in the comics.

 

[soviet]

I just watched this. I thought it was absolutely disgusting, a travesty of what the character is supposed to be. There's a superficial cosplay of addressing Castle's trauma (and Bernthal as ever does a great job of selling it) but the main part of the show is a gleeful mixture of a Doom level (with the metal soundtrack) and The Raid. This revels in the violence and presents it as acceptable and necessary. The show is careful to make a lot of the guys he kills white, and most of the friendly innocents black, but I think we all know what such a portrayal of inner-city violence is really code for. The George Floyd neck kneel on the young mafia kid is particularly offensive.

 

[chuckdee]

I... don't even know what to respond to that. So I'll leave it to someone else, other than I think we watched different shows.

 

[soviet]

I... don't even know what to respond to that. So I'll leave it to someone else, other than I think we watched different shows.

Perhaps we just have different levels of understanding.