We all saw it.
Marvel’s Punisher: One Last Kill delivers all the high-octane violence you could want out of Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal). During the 48-minute-long Special Presentation’s prolonged, action-packed climax he shoots, stabs and otherwise kills endless waves of nameless enemies (he even throws a few off of balconies for good measure). Then comes a moment that takes you entirely out of it. One of the bad guys shoves Frank off of a roof onto a big air conditioning unit on a lower section. He falls backwards while shooting back at his assailant in slow motion. But when he finally lands, you can clearly see Bernthal get replaced by an entirely digital person.
The moment looks like a death scene in GTA 5, it’s even slowed down in the same way. All that’s missing is the word “WASTED” over Bernthal’s writhing digital avatar. Clearly, Marvel not only believed audiences wouldn’t notice this bizarre choice, but thought it looked so good it could hold up under the increased scrutiny of slow motion. What’s especially perplexing about the moment is that it easily could have been handled by a stuntman. While most Marvel Studios projects need lots of visual effects to show superpowers and aliens and things like that, this was a basic shot of a human man falling off of a roof. (The use of VFX does allow us to see The Punisher’s face during the fall, while a stuntperson would likely have to be obscured in some way, but that still would have been better than what we actually got.)
So why the hell was it digital?
Really, the moment points to two ongoing issues in Marvel Studios projects: one that has been longstanding and another that has increasingly been a problem post-Avengers: Endgame.
While I don’t think it gets discussed enough, Marvel Studios has always had an overreliance on digital effects, using it for things like costumes that could have been done practically. For a long time, Marvel got away with this, which led to a degree of arrogance where the studio thinks fans can’t tell when something is CGI. Except, we often can tell, and we can also see that this problem has gotten worse since Avengers: Endgame.
With the expansion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe onto Disney Plus, poorly done and incomplete-looking digital effects became increasingly obvious, from the near-cartoon-like rendering of She-Hulk to the absurdly bad air battle in Black Widow.
Marvel has always farmed out its VFX work, but it seems its expectations on those companies have grown more unreasonable in recent years. Reporting from sites like Vulture and IGN have revealed how Marvel has placed more demands on these companies with less time to get them done, forcing VFX artists to work obscene hours. And it’s not as though these companies can afford to say “no” to Disney. Instead, the VFX studios just press their own employees even harder.
Besides the human effect, on screen the result has been that, as Marvel Studios moves forward in time, its VFX have looked more dated.
Despite years of fans consistently pointing out shoddy VFX work by Marvel, the problem has not improved. If anything, the problem may even get worse as the recent, sweeping layoffs at Disney hit Marvel especially hard, which will likely affect the quality control of Marvel Studio’s films. This goes double if Marvel is now going to start using VFX for even the most basic stunt work for its most grounded characters.