The Villain With Moxie
Frank Castle didn’t save his building. He detonated on it. And a million people watched and called it redemption.
I posted my hot take on Threads at 9:56am before I finished watching. Here it is. Twenty-nine likes, twenty-seven replies, spread across Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and No Agenda Social before I even got to the third act. That’s how cultural criticism works in 2026. You react, you distribute, you keep watching.
Then Ma Gnucci—disabled crime matriarch, wheelchair, silent guard—stood on the street below Frank Castle’s building and cackled up at him while he lay broken on the ground, and I said out loud to nobody: I just got diabetes.
Then I kept watching. And my opinion got more complicated.
The Punisher: One Last Kill is streaming now on Disney+. Watch the official trailer here. It runs 48 minutes. 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. 91% audience score. Critics at Den of Geek, IGN, and Roger Ebert’s site praised Jon Bernthal’s performance universally. Forbes called it easy to miss despite being genuinely good. The consensus is that it delivers. I am a minority position. But I think the minority position is worth stating.
Here is what actually happens in this film, stripped of the hero framing:
Frank Castle’s presence in an apartment building paints a target on every person who lives there. Ma Gnucci places a bounty on his head. Every criminal in the city descends on the building at 6:47pm. Dozens of people are terrorized, hurt, killed—not because they did anything, but because Frank Castle exists in their zip code.
Frank spends 48 minutes containing his own blast radius.
He didn’t save those people from evil. He spent the runtime minimizing the damage his own karma detonated on people who had nothing to do with his war. The building was fine until he was in it. The little girl who hands him a paper flower at the end—her safety was endangered specifically because Frank Castle was her neighbor.
This is not a rescue. This is triage on a self-inflicted wound.
The most honest scene in the film is Ma Gnucci’s monologue. Judith Light plays it completely straight. No villainy. Just a mother telling you about her sons. Her dead sons—the ones Frank killed. They were criminals. They were also her boys. She loved them. And her response to their deaths is structurally identical to Frank’s response to his own family’s murders: total war, no proportionality, burn everything down.
The film gives Frank’s grief sacred status and calls Ma’s grief villainy. But the math is the same. The only difference is which one we follow with the camera.
One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. This isn’t a new observation. It’s as old as recorded conflict. But the film pretends not to know it while showing you exactly that dynamic for 48 minutes.
Hammurabi’s Code—3,800 years ago—tried to limit retributive violence. An eye for an eye was a restraint, not a license. You only get one eye back. Not the whole family. Not the block. Proportionality was civilization’s first technology.
The Sermon on the Mount radicalized that further. Turn the other cheek isn’t weakness. It’s the recognition that the retribution cycle grinds everyone down equally and the only way to stop it is for someone to absorb the blow instead of returning it. Gandhi understood this. King understood this. It costs everything and it actually works.
Frank Castle is the anti-Sermon. He is the pure logical endpoint of following the retribution cycle all the way down with unlimited skill and zero restraint. And the film gives him a paper flower and calls it redemption.
I carry a Glock. I am not squeamish about violence. I am not making a pacifist argument. I am making a Christian one, which is different: the blast radius never stops expanding until someone chooses to stop it. Frank Castle never chooses to stop it. He just aims it.
The skull on the back of the Glock. The Punisher patch on the plate carrier. You see it everywhere in certain circles and it always means the same thing: I have already written my origin story. I know who the enemy is. I am waiting for the inciting incident.
The man wearing the skull isn’t identifying with Frank Castle’s grief. He’s identifying with Frank Castle’s permission structure. The grief licenses the war. The trauma justifies the blast radius. I suffered therefore I am permitted.
A million people watched One Last Kill and absorbed that lesson this week. Most of them won’t act on it. But the culture is a slow accumulation of permission structures, and this one keeps getting renewed.
The villain with moxie doesn’t see himself as the blast radius. He sees himself as the first responder. That’s what makes him dangerous. That’s what makes him watchable. That’s what makes the skull make sense to the man wearing it.
Frank Castle isn’t the antihero. He’s the villain with enough backstory that the audience grants him the hero frame. The moxie is the marketing. The blast radius is the product.
The paper flower is paid for by everyone else in the building.
Jon Bernthal earned every frame of this. His Frank Castle remains one of the most emotionally honest performances in the Marvel catalogue. The man is doing real work. I respect the trauma download. I just think the culture doesn’t need another permission structure dressed up as redemption right now.
Watch it on Disney+. Form your own opinion. Read the Roger Ebert review. Read Den of Geek. Check Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus says it delivers.
I say: at what cost, and to whom.
Chris Abraham writes at chrisabraham.substack.com. He is the founder of Gerris Corp, a 32° Scottish Rite Freemason, a returned Catholic who carries a Glock 19 and believes in turning the other cheek, and a man who posted a hot take before he finished the movie and stands by the longer thought anyway.