Our ongoing column giving the spotlight to movies that bucked the Hollywood Blockbuster trend and still managed to deliver a superior viewing experience. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By Sam Christopher
Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 Stars
This film is not connected in any way to the 1989 travesty of the same name which starred Dolph Lundgren, Louis Gossett, Jr., and a bunch of other people you’ve never heard of (although, in fairness, Gossett is a great actor). That first film, coming on the heels of Marvel’s extremely successful Mike Zeck-led Punisher mini-series, was doomed from the beginning in the eyes of the comics fans. The director, Mark Goldblatt, was quoted as saying the reason they wouldn’t be using the character’s trademark skull chest emblem on Lundgren’s chest was because “it makes him look too much like a comic book character”, leading most fans to wonder if the guy knew this was about a comic book character. Of course, we also wondered if he had ever seen Superman: The Movie or knew they were making a Batman film, cinematic displays in which the heroes had and surely would wear their costumes with pride. And star Lundgren didn’t help either, with his reported pronouncement that “there’s only so much you can do with this, it’s just a comic book character”. Then the film itself came out and all the fans’ worst fears were realized. A couple years ago a friend who’d never seen it found this version of The Punisher on DVD for a dollar. After he watched it he complained to me that he was overcharged.
Anyway, 15 years after the original debacle Marvel decided to make a new Punisher film, a complete reboot (on a modest budget of 16.5 million). The film starred Thomas Jane, a good actor with the physicality to play Frank Castle as the nuanced character he really needs to be. Castle is a man in pain. He is methodical while trying to hold back his rage at the senseless deaths of his family. It also had the talents of John Travolta to draw upon. Travolta plays Howard Saint, a man made rich through the laundering of drug money who also orders the execution of Castle and his entire family. Saint is a very good, very human, villain. He’s quirky and realistic, living in a world of self-imposed order before his destruction of the man Frank Castle was leads to the demise of his own world. The film is full of other quirky and strange characters: Saint’s head henchman Quentin, Castle’s “mole” Mickey, the people who live in the apartment building Castle moves into. Then there are the comic book touches, like the Russian, a huge behemoth who comes to the apartment building and spends what seems like an eternity throwing Castle through walls in an attempt to pummel him to death. Through it all part of the plan Castle employs to systematically destroy everything about Howard Saint before finally killing the man himself.
I saw this film and was stunned by it. It was so good, so well done. Yes, they changed some things about the character from the comics but I expected that, and these changes just weren’t that big a deal. I waited for the announced sequel. The next I heard, they were doing another Punisher origin story with another set of actors and still a third Frank Castle. I was told that Jane’s Punisher just wasn’t very commercially successful and that was the reason for the change. I have since learned that the film tripled its budget at the theaters and then did pretty well on DVD, and that there was going to be a sequel but Jane and the director quit over “creative differences” and that’s when the decision to start over was made. I also have read reviews of this picture that complain about the lack of humor in Jane’s demeanor, that Castle seems to get no enjoyment out of his exploits. This is The Punisher, folks, not Ambush Bug, The whole point is that Castle is not doing what he enjoys, only what he believes he has to do. Frank Castle would much rather be playing with his children and making love to his wife; instead, he has to be The Punisher and try and make sure fewer people have to experience what he has.
Buy The Punisher and Other Anti-Blockbusters on DVD from Amazon.com:
