You think it’s tough being the Punisher? Try being a Hollywood special effects artist.
Their work is currently going viral all over social media, thanks to one particular shot in the new Marvel TV special, The Punisher: One Last Kill. Near the end of the show — and this is not really much of a spoiler — Jon Bernthal’s Punisher goes one-on-a-million against a nearly endless army of thugs. The battle spills out onto the rooftop of Frank Castle’s apartment building, where one of the goons shoves Frank over the side.
In the shot in question, the Punisher falls and crashes into some kind of big metal box — maybe an air conditioner? — on the ledge below. Only it’s very clearly not Jon Bernthal doing the crashing; at least not a flesh-and-blood Jon Bernthal. It looks more like some weird digital double, flopping and flailing about.
You can see the sequence in question below — in a tweet that accuses it of being an “unfinished VFX shot.”
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Just one video of the shot on X has already been viewed more than six million times.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, this shot was not unfinished — or even an entirely CGI character. They claim, per “a source” that “this is a real in-camera shot” in which Jon Bernthal’s stuntman “took over for the impact shot.” The only special effects involved were supposedly used to swap the stuntman’s face for Bernthal’s.
That may very well be — but that didn’t stop social media from lighting up with jokes about the moment, with users comparing it unfavorably to video game cutscenes of all shapes and sizes.
This is a cautionary tale. The Punisher: One Last Kill features a lot of gritty, practical stunt work. The fight choreography is brutal and bloody. It’s not really much of a story, but Jon Bernthal clearly worked very hard on the show’s action. According to THR, even this moment was done practically.
But rather than shoot a practical fall in a way that obscured the stunt man’s face, preserving the feeling of real physics at play on the human body, CGI got involved and made the moment feel strange and weightless. (The way the shot lingers after the initial impact doesn’t help. Neither does the fact that it takes place in broad daylight.)
If you want to see this thing for yourself, The Punisher: One Last Kill is now streaming on Disney+. The rest of the show is pretty good!
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