Believe it or not, that 'VFX fail' in The Punisher special was filmed with a real stuntman

Released on Disney+ this week, The Punisher: One Last Kill got generally good reviews, apart from one particular scene, which has taken a real beating. Viewers were shocked by a stunt shot that many declared had the look of 'unfinished VFX' that had been left in the film, either because time and budget ran out, or Marvel Television decided it was good enough.

The shot shows vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) falling onto a large crate after being pushed from a building. For many viewers, something seemed off. It didn't look like Bernthal's face, and the whole shot resembled computer graphics. After some slowing down and zooming in, people were soon comparing it to a cut scene from a game like Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne or The Last of Us.

The shot was fast on its way to becoming a meme, but it turns out that it isn't as fake as it might look

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“Marvel ‘accidentally’ dropping unfinished VFX in 2026 is crazy — Jon Bernthal is out here doing God-tier Punisher rage, but they hit him with PS3 ragdoll physics,” one person wrote about the scene on X.

Others were convinced the shot was AI generated. "Look how the box he was dropped on retained its shape after the broken pieces slide off. A CG artist would at least have deformed the object. An AI fed a screenshot with a prompt, however, would very possibly maintain the box's shape to keep consistency with the prompt image," someone wrote.

"This is the type of shit an artist on Twitter would post saying 'testing out some deformation physics :)' not from a full-on show," someone else complained.

Yet it seems the shot from The Punisher special might just be an unfortunate mix of elements that ended up making something that was (mainly) real look artificial. A "source close to the production" has told The Hollywood Reporter that it was a real in-camera shot. Bernthal himself performed the initial part of the fall, while his stuntman performed the moment of impact. The only VFX used was the standard procedure of replacing the stuntman's face with Benthal's.

The face swap might partly explain why the shot looks a bit janky. There might also be an element of mistiming and an unfortunate combination of shot angle and lighting that creates the artificial look. But it also looks a lot worse when slowed down and watched on repeat than it did at a normal pace in the show.

It's another example of how every piece of artwork and every scene in a movie can get picked apart these days as fans get more wise to VFX techniques, and particularly the use of AI (see the controversy over Apple's Lady Gaga artwork and the Lego World Cup advert). For every work outed as a fake, there will be some that are genuine.

"This is why we can't have nice things," one person writes on X. "WTF Marvel lazy CGI PS2 cutscene!! Reality: A stuntman YEETS himself off a building for real, eats the impact on crates like a champ... we’ve been conditioned by green screen slop so hard that actual practical stunts now look 'fake' to us."

"Bro risked ending up on a wheelchair for life only for the shot to look like a cutscene from a PS3 game," someone else laments.

The Punisher: One Last Kill is a one-off episode that picks up The Punisher’s story after the 2017 series. The character will appear again soon in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Meanwhile, people think The Punisher inspired the new Tesla logo.