The Punisher Review
by Martin Phipps (phippsmartin AT hotmail DOT com)November 4th, 2004
The Punisher is a damn good movie. This is coming from somebody who never understood the appeal of the Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies.
I suppose those movies would appeal to you if you believed that any consideration of human rights only served to interfere in carrying out of the righteous slaughter of the criminal element of society.
Nevermind the debate on capital punishment, let's just skip the arrest, the trial and jury deliberations and just shoot criminals on sight! Hell, for that matter, why should I take the time to recommend this movie at all when I obviously strongly disagree with the very notion that any one man has the right to decide who lives and who dies? Indeed, there is even the subtle implication in the phrase "this is not revenge but punishment" that suggests that The Punisher is acting out of righteous indignation when he plays the role of judge, jury and executioner!
Thing is, as I said, this is a good movie, probably too good for the genre which is why it, ironically, didn't do as well as might have been expected. The basic problem, I suppose, was that this is not quite the same character as in the comics: in the comics, The Punisher was a Vietnam War vet who, after seeing his family shot down in a gangland style massacre in Central Park, snapped and started going after all criminals. I presume that he did so with the objective of, in the process, killing the people responsible for his family's death but, in the comics anyway, he didn't see it so much as his personal revenge but as some kind of war. The movie character is slightly different in the sense that Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), having apparently finished his military service, had been working for the FBI, hunting down the very criminals who ended up killing his family.
In the movie, the murder of his family is no longer random and neither is his response. The result is a more thoughtful, more methodical character who can imagine more inventive ways of punishing you than simply blowing your head off.
The fact that Frank Castle didn't go straight to Howard Saint(John Travolta)'s home and blow his head off in act one was, no doubt, a source of great frustration to fans of the Death Wish and Dirty Harry movies. (Indeed, the character of the Punisher in the comics was no doubt inspired by these movies.) I must confess that I, too, was a bit confused seeing Frank Castle taking pictures and carrying around a fake fire hydrant. But where is the satisfaction in seeing the villain die without first being made to suffer? When Frank Castle's plan started to come together, I was satisfied to see that he had taken the time to play with his opponents head before blowing it off. After all, when a man has killed your entire family, one has the obligation to go to the extra effort of attacking him on more than one level!
Of course, we are "treated" to scenes in which the villains are shown to be truly evil so that we don't feel bad about their demise (much in the same way that the wedding massacre was shown over and over again in Kill Bill 1 & 2 in the hopes that we wouldn't start routing for the "bad" guys): Howard Saint kills one of his own men, his wife (Laura
Harring) orders the massacre of Frank Castle's family, his second-in-command (Will Patton) carries it out and his surviving son has the honour of actually (making an attempt at) killing Frank Castle in revenge for his brother's death. Even so, Frank Castle's neighbour (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) asks the obvious question "What makes you any different from them?"
Well, he isn't any different. That was the point of the comics when he first appeared as a villain in the Spiderman series, a point that got lost along the way when he went on to get his own series. But in this movie I was able to root for this protagonist precisely because he was following the golden rule and doing unto the villains exactly as they had planned to do to him. Indeed, as I have already stated above, for Frank Castle to have killed Howard Saint in the first act would have made the rest of the movie not only anti-climactic but would have rendered the movie completely soulless with Frank Castle going on to kill random drug dealers with whom he didn't have a personal grudge.
Of course, with that in mind, I dread to think what a sequel to this movie would be like. Presumably, in a sequel, Frank Castle would be no different from the character in the comics, deciding who lives and who dies on the spot and without any sense of remorse, one way or the other. While I understand Thomas Jane's enthusiasm in wanting to make a sequel, I no sooner want to spend two hours watching the Punisher shoot people than I would want to watch a Hulk sequel which was merely two hours of "Hulk Smash!"
Of course, there is always the chance, should a Punisher sequel ever be made, that I might be pleasantly surprised, yet again. Maybe.
Martin Phipps
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
