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The Punisher season 2 reviews roundup: What the critics are saying about return of Marvel series on Netflix

Jon Berntha has finally returned as the comic book vigilante

Jacob Stolworthy

Friday 18 January 2019 11:02 GMT

Marvel’s The Punisher: Season 2 trailer

The Punisher has returned to Netflix for a second season.

Former Walking Dead star Jon Bernthal returns in one of the streaming service’s remaning Marvel television show as Frank Castle, a revenge-seeking vigilante who continues to uncover a criminal conspiracy.

A spinoff to Daredevil, which was axed in 2018, The Punisher began in 2017 and scored rave reviews upon its debut.

Reviews for this second outing, which also stars Deborah Ann Woll and Ben Barnes, are much more mixed.

You can find a roundup below.

The best reason to watch the show, aside from Bernthal’s charisma and tendency to grunt like a gorilla when he’s amped up, is the consistently brutal action. Like almost every Marvel Netflix show, 13 episodes is too long, with endless slow burn followed by a final episode that struggles to cram everything in.

IGN

Best TV of 2018

Show all 10

1/10Best TV of 2018

Best TV of 2018

10) Save Me

Lennie James's missing-child thriller Save Me looked as though it might be a paint-by-numbers affair. Instead it was a gripping start to Sky Atlantic's impressive run, with James taking the lead as Nelly, the womanising bum who gains a new lease of investigative energy when his estranged daughter Jody vanishes. A smart script kept us guessing right up to an ending that denied us the closure we had expected. A second series has been commissioned.

Sky

Best TV of 2018

9) Cunk on Britain

How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now.

BBC

Best TV of 2018

8) Sally4Ever

You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.

Sky

Best TV of 2018

7) The Little Drummer Girl

This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller.

BBC

Best TV of 2018

6) A Very English Scandal

Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it?

BBC

Best TV of 2018

5) Patrick Melrose

Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too.

Sky

Best TV of 2018

4) Dynasties

At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography.

BBC

Best TV of 2018

3) Killing Eve

It's unusual for a TV writer to attract more attention than the stars or director. Perhaps the world is changing. Or perhaps it's simply that the writer of Killing Eve was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, star of Fleabag, Star Wars and one of the country's outstanding new talents. Here she turned her hand to a spy thriller, an adaptation of Luke Jennings' novels about a beautiful assassin, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and the MI6 agent given the task of hunting her down, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). Both leads demanded attention: Comer the magnetic murderer, Oh the harassed but brilliant spy. The script swerved between comedy, action and drama often enough to keep everyone guessing.

BBC

Best TV of 2018

2) England vs Colombia

Yes, the national team have played on television in a World Cup before, but I'm including this because the outcome, an England penalty shoot-out victory, was so unusual as to count as a whole new format. At a time when we all watch things at different times, here was something unmistakably live. We watched Gareth Southgate's men knowing that the rest of the country was, too, poised in living rooms and pub gardens, ready to bury their heads in a sofa or throw their pints in the air. No other TV programme sold as many waistcoats.

Rex Features

Best TV of 2018

1) Succession

The ageing patriarch and his scheming children. Not an original concept. Trust, the drama about the last days of Getty family, proved that it was possible for a series built on this premise to have actors, scenery, direction, script, etc etc, and still somehow fall short. Succession, by comparison, felt alive. If US production values and ambition gave it its scale, its heart was dark and British. We can thank Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show, and his all-star line-up of British writers, including the Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett. They made the Roy family expats themselves, and you could hear the old aristocratic froideur in every withering put-down. But we cared for them, too. One of the many TV professionals I consulted for this list thought Succession was so much better than everything else this year that the top 10 should just have it listed in bold and then nine blank spaces. I wouldn't go that far but it's certainly at the top.

Alamy Stock Photo

The first few episodes of the season attempt to make a fairly clean break from the events, characters, and setting of season one. Unfortunately, it’s here where one of the fundamental flaws of season two becomes apparent. These newcomers struggle to measure up. Ironically, it’s only when it clings to the past that it becomes the show it was meant to be.

Season one of The Punisher was a standout among the Marvel Netflix shows because of the tightly intertwined characters and narrative. Season two loses that sense of focus and purpose. The writers seem to have an endless supply of puzzle metaphors to reference [the villain] Jigsaw, but they don’t seem as concerned with how poorly the pieces of their plot fit together.

Den of Geek

The Punisher season one wasted a completely competent origin story gifted to it by Daredevil that ended with Frank Castle suiting up in all his trench coat and skull-vest glory, just to essentially repilot in episode one and have him literally throw it all away in a trash can fire before the opening credits. I bring all this up to give you the full scope of what I mean when I say that The Punisher season two is a massive improvement on its predecessor and even stands head-and-shoulders above some of the other shows in the Marvel/Netlix pantheon.

The Punisher season two is available to stream on Netflix now.

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