Fans Are Zooming In and Getting Mad at the VFX of One Shot of ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’

The Punisher: One Last Kill arrived on Disney+ this week, continuing (and to an extent, soft rebooting) the story of Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle. Amid the explosive events of Daredevil: Born Again and Frank’s upcoming appearance in this summer’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, there was a lot that this special could have given Marvel fans to talk about… but a lot of that has been dwarfed by one unfortunate VFX shot.

The shot in question arrives in the middle of the special’s biggest action sequence, as Frank Castle fights a parade of assassins trying to collect the bounty placed on his head by Ma Gnucci (Judith Light). Frank falls off of a rooftop and lands on a metal box below… and the end result looks more than a little uncanny.

In the hours after the special debuted, you didn’t have to go far on social media to see complaints about this specific shot. Countless jokes compared it to something you’d see in a PlayStation 3 game, whether it be a Grand Theft Auto cutscene or a lost Joel Miller scene from The Last of Us games.

A report from The Hollywood Reporter claims that it is a “real in-camera shot”, blending together a take of Bernthal falling and his stuntman landing for the impact. VFX were used to swap Bernthal’s face onto the stuntman, and presumably to swap the surface the stuntman landed on for the pieces of metal.

This isn’t even the only technical problem that has plagued The Punisher: One Last Kill, as many also criticized the special for wonky or downright incomprehensible sound mixing. Viewers began to realize that the audio track was not configured well for surround sound speakers, with dialogue only coming out of one corner or barely being able to be heard at all, while the music and certain sound effects were overwhelmingly loud. Comparisons were, naturally, made to the very intentional sound mixing in Christopher Nolan movies, doubly so because Bernthal is set to appear in his adaptation of The Odyssey later this summer.

An official Disney+ Twitter account addressed the ordeal, tweeting on Wednesday morning that: “Thank you for reaching out and letting us know you’re experiencing no audio while watching The Punisher: One Last Kill. The good news is that our team knows about this particular issue and is working on a solution as we speak. Let us know if we can help with anything else!”

How Did This Happen?!

The sound mixing situation was its own separate, but fixable, can of worms. People’s individual experiences with it varied — I, personally, definitely noticed that the audio felt distantly to the right of my speakers when I watched the special on Wednesday morning. But it did add an extra layer of irony to a special centered around a character who is known for his very animated screaming and grunting.

But the reactions to the shot of Frank falling are more than valid… doubly so now that we know how it was seemingly brought to life. Swapping actor’s faces onto stuntmen and swapping out landing cushions for actual props is certainly nothing new: both tactics have been used before we even had the modern VFX that we do today. But that doesn’t excuse the shot for ultimately falling into the uncanny valley, between the digital swap of Bernthal’s face looking so static, and the relationship between Frank’s body and the metal looking like (in the words of some tweets) “ragdoll physics.”

Given how much of the Internet has become a minefield of AI deepfakes designed to fool people, I’m honestly glad that so many viewers were able to catch that something looked so off about this shot. And as much as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a cultural juggernaut, the love people have for it still doesn’t make it immune to criticism.

We’ve seen this before with other awkward VFX shots in MCU projects before, whether with that one kid’s floating head in Thor: Love and Thunder, or… the entirety of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Around the time of Quantumania‘s release, a number of VFX artists anonymously confessed to Vulture that the studio had taken “shortcuts” to get its VFX finished on time, down to trimming certain scenes to “cover up the inability to get it done.”

Even last year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps may have potentially suffered from a similar problem, with dozens of shots shown in the film’s trailers that never made it into the final movie. When asked about the possibility of a director’s cut, Matt Shakman shut it down, telling Elite Daily that “there are so many visual effects involved that those scenes remain unfinished, so that’s not possible.”

So yeah, the wonky VFX in The Punisher: One Last Kill are more than just a small nitpick. They’re a sign that fans are asking better of a franchise that’s nearly twenty years into its run. If the MCU can so seamlessly make talking trees and a family of Hulks feel real, Frank Castle falling off a roof should be able to feel real too.

The Punisher: One Last Kill is now streaming exclusively on Disney+.

(featured image: Disney+)

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