What is Punisher: One Last Kill worth on Disney+? (critical)

Jon Bernthal goes into John Wick mode in a special 45-minute episode that is melancholic and powerful as hell. Visceral if not essential.

You’ve never seen the MCU like this!

After his muscular comeback in Daredevil: Born Again, and after disappearing without warning at the end of season 1, Frank Castle today plunges back into the dirty streets of New York for a new intimate and ultra-violent war.

Spoiler alert!

Jon Bernthal wears the black skull costume again for a special episode. In Punisher: One Last Kill, the anti-hero tries to survive something other than his gruesome punishment. He has just eliminated the last thugs who were involved in the assassination of his family. His revenge is over. Suddenly… he no longer has a reason to live! He wanders aimlessly, haunted by his demons, in the (invented) neighborhood of Little Sicily, totally left to his own devices since Frank executed the entire Gnucci family, the local mafia who held the corner with an iron fist. From now on, it is total anarchy. From his vendetta was born a twilight savagery where no law prevails, not even that of the street. But Frank doesn’t care. All this no longer concerns him. Drowned in his melancholy and insatiable rage, he no longer really belongs to this world. Paradoxically, it is “Ma” Gnucci (a character from the comics of the 2000s played here by Judith Light from Madame estServe) who will bring him back among the living. The clan matriarch survived. She saw her husband and three sons mercilessly executed by the Punisher. So she wants her revenge too. She put a price on the head of her enemy. And suddenly, all the gangsters from Little Sicily are rushing after Frank Castle…

After screaming all his pain for 25 minutes, Jon Bernthal, still as inhabited as ever, goes into action mode. We even want to say in John Wick mode as the most tortured character in the Marvel Universe methodically kills the string of villains who follow one another in front of him to try their luck. There are ten, twenty, thirty of them, armed with baseball bats, guns, machetes, Kalashnikovs, Uzis. But none are up to the task. One by one, they are carefully unsoldered by a Frank Castle, more animal than ever, who finds a taste for life while the corpses rain down. Behind the camera, Reinaldo Marcus Green – the polar opposite of his successful biopic on Bob Marley – takes ostensible pleasure in drawing blood in sequences of breathtaking brutality. We couldn’t imagine looking away from the ferocity of a Marvel series. But that’s what happens when the Punisher gets angry.

Obviously, it’s a bit short. Fifteen minutes of uncompromising barbaric unleashing. Not much at all. An immense cathartic butchery as a link between the Punisher of the Netflix years and the one who is destined to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Just enough to allow Frank Castle to land on his feet while waiting to find him this summer at the cinema opposite Spider-Man in Brand New Day.

If he skipped the anti-Wilson Fisk revolt led by Daredevil in season 2 of Born Again, it’s because Frank Castle needed to treat himself to a little bloodbath as a rejuvenating bath. To better start off on the right foot… in your face!

Punisher: One Last Kill, 1 episode to watch on Disney+ from May 13, 2026.