Anyone looking forward to The Punisher?

[Ryanwb]

I remember seeing the original Punisher with Dolph Lungren in the theaters years ago.

Besides Batman, i can't say I particularly enjoy super hero movies if the hero doesn't have super powers.

 

[Chaplin]

To me, this is just another revenge movie. What's the difference between this movie, and, say, Death Wish? Nothing, except the character is based on a comic book. But it looks like a standard revenge movie to me. Plus, I think their casting was a little strange.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

To me, this is just another revenge movie. What's the difference between this movie, and, say, Death Wish? Nothing, except the character is based on a comic book. But it looks like a standard revenge movie to me. Plus, I think their casting was a little strange.

The character of the Punisher predates the Death Wish movies.

I'm looking forward to seeing this movie, but then again...it's based on a Marvel Comics' character - so I'm biased.

It will be interesting to see how true to the character (from the comics) they are.

 

[Brandon_Webb]

I'm looking forward to seeing it

 

[Chaplin]

The character of the Punisher predates the Death Wish movies.

So? What's your point? The issue is not whether the comic book was any good, or actually anything about the comic book. It's about the potential of the movie, which looks to be another standard revenge flick.

Nothing wrong with having a loyalty to the comics, but what is going to make it any different than movies like Death Wish? The fact that it comes from a comic book isn't enough--since The Punisher doesn't have any special abilities--the only thing I could remember was that tacky shirt and the eyepatch (which I understand isn't even in the movie).

 

[Stout]

C'mon, Chap, as a defender of remakes, I think you're being a little two-sided, here. Yeah, revenge flicks have been made tons of times, but the Punisher is a cool story line. The first film sucked, and this isn't really a remake, so why should we just disregard it?

 

[Ryanwb]

C'mon, Chap, as a defender of remakes, I think you're being a little two-sided, here. Yeah, revenge flicks have been made tons of times, but the Punisher is a cool story line. The first film sucked, and this isn't really a remake, so why should we just disregard it?

You just do what ever BIM does....you BIM lover!

 

[Brian in Mesa]

The Punisher doesn't have any special abilities--the only thing I could remember was that tacky shirt and the eyepatch (which I understand isn't even in the movie).

He's a highly trained soldier and a weapons expert. I call those special abilities.

Eyepatch? Are you thinking of a specific storyline, or are you thinking of Nick Fury: Agent of Shield. He has an eyepatch.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

C'mon, Chap, as a defender of remakes, I think you're being a little two-sided, here.

Exactly.

 

[Chaplin]

C'mon, Chap, as a defender of remakes, I think you're being a little two-sided, here. Yeah, revenge flicks have been made tons of times, but the Punisher is a cool story line. The first film sucked, and this isn't really a remake, so why should we just disregard it?

Excuse me? I not once even thought about that Dolph Lundgren version. As far as I'm concerned, in this discussion, that movie isn't even thought about. Now that you mention it--I would say that the earlier movie needs a remake!

Yeah, BIM, you're right, I was thinking of Nick Fury. Yet another personality trait that the Punisher DOESN'T have.

Trained soldier and weapons expert. Hmmm. Ever seen Rambo, by chance??

 

[Ryanwb]

BIM, do you collect the punisher war journals?

 

[Brian in Mesa]

I have a lot of that series. I have Amazing Spider-Man #129 (first appearance of the Punisher). I have a lot of the various Punisher series including the first mini-series he ever got on his own, except that I was staying at my Uncle's house at the time and his little dog trashed the cover of one of the comics...AARRGGHH.

And, being a comic geek...I even have the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie...on dvd.

 

[Ryanwb]

I have a lot of that series. I have Amazing Spider-Man #129 (first appearance of the Punisher). I have a lot of the various Punisher series including the first mini-series he ever got on his own, except that I was staying at my Uncle's house at the time and his little dog trashed the cover of one of the comics...AARRGGHH.

And, being a comic geek...I even have the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie...on dvd.

BIM, do you have a prized comic?

 

[Brian in Mesa]

BIM, do you have a prized comic?

PWI #47...signed by AzCards21 himself.

 

[Mike Olbinski]

To me, this is just another revenge movie. What's the difference between this movie, and, say, Death Wish? Nothing, except the character is based on a comic book. But it looks like a standard revenge movie to me. Plus, I think their casting was a little strange.

I would say about 70%of movies today aren't original...so with that attitude, we'd never see any movies...

Mike

 

[Chaplin]

I would say about 70%of movies today aren't original...so with that attitude, we'd never see any movies...

Mike

You're not seeing the point, but ok...

 

[mdamien13]

VERY much looking forward to this movie. My favorite comic, and if the trailers are to be believed then this movie is inspired by my favorite mini-series of the comic, "Welcome Back Frank" penned by Garth (Preacher) Ennis. I think this movie's gonna kick ass and I'm pretty P.O.'d that they're opening it against Kill Bill vol 2. Still it had a relatively low budget so it should do well at the box office.

I only hope it lifts that memory of the Dolph Lundgren blasphemy from my mind.

 

[mdamien13]

I would say about 70%of movies today aren't original...so with that attitude, we'd never see any movies...

Mike

I took a screenwriting class in college and my professor had a theory that every story could be traced back to one of four basic plotlines. It wasn't his theory - it's a published study - but it was kind of funny cause it was hard to disprove. I'll try to find it online.

So by that theory every movie has basically been done before. Revenge movies are fun, I say bring 'em on. Whether it's Buford Pusser or Paul Kersey or Jack Carter or Frank Castle.

 

[Chaplin]

Here's a review I found on the net, I know nobody cares, but it's interesting to read about...

Jonathan Hensleigh's directorial debut is the second movie to be based on the Marvel Comics character of The Punisher. The first film, released in 1989, stars Dolph Lundgren in the role essayed here by Thomas Jane. The earlier picture is rarely cited as one of the great comic book-to-screen translations, and, unfortunately, the 2004 version doesn't make a noticeable improvement. In recent years, a lot of Marvel superheroes have made the leap from printed page to silver screen. None has been given more shoddy treatment than The Punisher.

The material isn't inherently bad. This is essentially a revenge story, in the grand tradition of Death Wish (although it bears a stronger resemblance to the recent Vin Diesel bomb, A Man Apart). The problem is that Hensleigh creates a motion picture with a split personality. The tone evident in the film's early scenes is radically divergent from what it morphs into, and the union of bleak tragedy, camp, and mostly-unintentional comedy curdles. Think of what might happen if someone grafted parts of Batman and Robin onto The Crow, and you'll have an idea of how unpalatable The Punisher is.

The film opens by introducing us to Federal agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), who is on his last assignment before he retires and takes his wife and child to live in London. Things go wrong and the son of local mob boss Howard Saint (John Travolta) is killed. Saint wants more than an eye for an eye, so he sends his enforcer, Quentin Glass (Will Patton), and a goon squad to Puerto Rico, where the Castle family is holding a reunion. Glass and about a dozen armed men wipe out Castle's family, including his son, wife (Samantha Mathis), and father (Roy Scheider). They believe they have killed Castle as well, but it's a miscalculation. He returns, albeit not quite from the grave, to seek vengeance against Glass, Saint, and Saint's wife, Livia (Laura Harring).

The campy, silly elements of the film's second half - which include outrageous one-liners ("God's gonna sit this one out!") and corny visual cues (big moments punctuated by a thunderclap) - would have been more enjoyable if the first 30 minutes weren't so depressing and gritty. Once Samantha Mathis, Roy Scheider, a young kid, and a large group of extras are dispatched, we're supposed to forget about their brutal exit and vicariously enjoy Frank's quest for revenge, which is played out like a B-movie with an extra helping of cheese. Hansleigh, whose previous Hollywood experience is as a script writer (Armageddon), includes as many cues as possible to get 13-year old boys on their feet cheering. (The problem is that, at least in theory, because of the R-rating, 13-year old boys can't see the movie.)

It's possible to argue that Hansleigh intended for the movie to be so intentionally dumb that it's meant to be funny. But the grim first act argues against that. The filmmakers may be aware that they're not making high art, but they want us to sympathize with Frank and be into his mission of righteous vengeance. We're not. The screenplay is sloppy and overlong, and, when the last bad guy has been dispatched, we feel no satisfaction. The movie pilfers freely from other, better films - the Russian bears more than a passing resemblance to From Russia with Love's Red, and one of the one-liners is taken directly from Brian DePalma's The Untouchables. In a better movie, such cribs might be considered homages; here, they sully the source.

Thomas Jane appears to be in a quandary about whether to play Frank with a straight intensity or a wink-and-a-nod. He opts for something down the middle, which effectively dehumanizes the protagonist. Frank's alcoholism is an easily dispatched plot device and his relationship with a downtrodden woman (played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, sans blue body paint) is little more than an excuse to get a pretty face on the screen. The cast is populated by familiar actors from bygone days. Once, Mathis and Scheider would have merited more that glorified cameos. Would that John Travolta had been thus limited… The star has been effective as a villain in several previous outings (Face/Off and Swordfish come to mind), but Saint means little more to the actor than a paycheck. He isn't menacing and doesn't represent an imposing adversary. Will Patton, who has a knack for playing detestable individuals, is far more worthy of our hatred. But the method of his elimination is a cheat.

In trying to describe what goes wrong with The Punisher, the best illustration may come from Batman. The two cinematic incarnations of the Caped Crusader have been markedly different in tone and intent. The first one, starring Adam West, was openly silly, and embraced its campiness to comedic effect. But there's never any mention of Batman's bleak origins. The Tim Burton version is dark and operatic, and dwells on Bruce Wayne's sad past. There's little humor in Burton's Gotham City unless it's grim and twisted. Now, imagine inserting West's character into Burton's world and you get a sense of the kind of mismatch that The Punisher offers. Marvel Comics may be intent upon getting every possible character in their superhero stable into a movie, but this is one instance when more effort should have been invested in the screenplay. The Punisher isn't Frank Castle; it's Jonathan Hensleigh. And the punishee is anyone sitting in the audience.


© 2004 James Berardinelli

 

[mdamien13]

You know what they say - opinions are like a-holes and everybody's got one (or two if you're a mutant)

For all of us fanboys, it's not all doom-and-gloom. Check out a glowing review from Moriarty over at Ain't It Cool News. (If you check their main page you'll see a few dissenting opinions from viewers too but here's a rebuttal to the negatives)

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=17056

Moriarty Has Seen THE PUNISHER!!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
First confession: I’ve read very little of THE PUNISHER. I’ve read a lot of comic books in my life, and I’m certainly aware of the character, but I wouldn’t profess any special knowledge of Frank Castle or his story.
Second confession: I fully expected this film to suck.
I can’t even fully explain why. Maybe it’s because I’ve never sparked to the character. Maybe it’s because the teaser trailer did nothing for me. Maybe it’s because Jonathan Hensleigh’s never directed before, and most of the films he’s worked on have been giant Hollywood spectacles.
Or maybe it was just John Travolta that had me worried. Would you blame me?
At any rate, when I got asked to come out to see the film last week, I decided to set aside all my hesitations and just give it a shot. What convinced me was the open enthusiasm I kept hearing as I spoke to Kevin Fiege and Ari Arad. They sounded confident, sure of what they had. They’d invited me to a press conference in Tampa last year that took place near the end of filming, but I was on vacation, a belated honeymoon with my wife, and even though the idea of visiting the set of a Marvel movie in my old hometown was appealing, I had to pass. It just didn’t time out right. Now, just a few months later, it seemed, they were calling to say the film was done and ready to be seen. Frankly, I’m shocked at how fast it was finished, but if they were ready to show it, I figured they must be proud of it.
And, now that I’ve seen it, I know why.
Jonathan Hensleigh’s credits as a writer include THE SAINT, JUMANJI, CON AIR, and of course, the biggest film he ever wrote, Michael Bay’s ARMAGEDDON. It would be easy to look at a list of the films he’s written and assume that you will be getting more of the same with THE PUNISHER.
Easy, but incorrect.
THE PUNISHER has more in common with the work of Don Seigel and John Frankenheimer than it does with the work of Michael Bay or Simon West. To Hensleigh’s credit, what he’s done here is make a character-driven revenge drama that resolutely refuses to fit into the easy current definition of the “comic-book” movie. This isn’t like any of the other recent Marvel movies, so before you start screaming at me about BLADE 2 or DAREDEVIL or HULK, save yourself the hassle. This is nothing like those films, whatever you think of them.
Is it like the source material? Honestly, I can’t answer that question. Does it work as a movie? Yeah. It sure does.
Frank Castle, played by Thomas Jane, is a great undercover cop, but he’s tired of it. He’s got a little boy and a wife, played by the lovely Samantha Mathis, who projects such an earthy, natural charm that it’s easy to see why Frank values them both so much. He wants a real life with them, especially when his latest bust ends with the death of a young man, the wealthy son of Howard Saint, played by John Travolta. Castle walks away, disillusioned, hoping to start over in a better life. But...
… yes, that’s right. There’s always a but, and in this case, it’s the grief of two parents that hangs over Castle like a shadow, pursuing him. Howard Saint and his wife Livia (Laura Harring of MULHOLLAND DRIVE) are both ruined, shattered by their boy’s death. It’s actually her who orders their footsoldiers to kill Castle’s entire family.
Frank and his family gather for a reunion in the Bahamas.. All the Castles together, including Frank’s father (Roy Scheider). It’s a perfect setup... isolated, all of them caught unaware. When Hensleigh sends in the goons with the machine guns, it’s a bloodbath. Castle doesn’t just lose a wife and a child. He loses every single person that connects him to the world. He’s cut completely loose and then left for dead.
The thing that makes this such a refreshing change from the other Marvel movies is that Frank doesn’t suddenly get magic powers. He doesn’t figure out he’s a mutant. He can’t fly or bend steel bars or shoot flame out of his fingers.
No, the amazing thing that Frank does is he survives. He lives when he shouldn’t. No one else could have.
And he grieves. He aches for what he’s lost.
Castle nurses that private pain, and he plans revenge. He doesn’t mean to serve justice or turn someone in to the cops. He wants to hurt those who hurt him. It’s that simple. Someone reached into his life and disrupted it, and he decides to use this improbable second chance at life for one purpose: revenge.
Hensleigh’s taken his cues here from films like John Boorman’s masterful POINT BLANK. Thomas Jane is a fascinating actor who hasn’t had the benefit of much good material in his career. BOOGIE NIGHTS was an impressive introduction to him, and even though the film THURSDAY is flawed, the work Jane did in it suggested even bigger and better things. He’s perfect for this role because he’s an implosive personality rather than an explosive one. He simmers. He seems like he’s riding out this barely-restrained rage, and in the moments where he actually lets go and lashes out, he’s impressively scary.
I expected Jane to do good work, though. The film’s real surprise is John Travolta. It took me a little while to get used to his performance in this film, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. It’s been such a long time since he’s given a genuine performance that didn’t draw on his bag of tricks that I actually forgot what it looked like when he just acted. Like many movie stars, Travolta’s been coasting for a while now, making safe choices, doing fairly over-the-top work. Movies like DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE and BASIC have been hard to set through, obvious movies that gave him very hammy roles to chew on. Here, he’s the model of restraint. He’s in shock. Even worse, he feels alone, paranoid, unable to even turn to his wife or his second-in-command, played incredibly well by Will Patton. He’s adrift, and like Frank, all he can fill this sudden gnawing emptiness with is revenge. Even as his business falls apart, he stays focused on Frank Castle.
And, yeah... it’s pretty much just that simple. There’s no manufactured bigger crisis that Frank has to avert. There’s no greater good that he starts serving. There are people in his run-down apartment building who he forms tenuous connections to, a sort of substitute family of misfits. There’s Joan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), mousy and tired and absolutely unable to pick a guy who isn’t going to beat her up. She moves from city to city to get away from rotten relationships, but she’s getting to the age where running doesn’t make sense any more. Bumpo (Jon Pinette) and Dave (Ben Foster) just don’t fit anywhere else. Even though they manage to get Castle to connect to the world again, they aren’t able to turn him from the task at hand, and in the end, they’re no substitute for his real family. Their small kindnesses to Frank don’t go unrewarded, but he is too far gone to step back into a normal life.
Lately, I’ve seen some great revenge films. Both OLD BOY and KILL BILL, VOL. I made my ten best list for 2003, and they set the bar pretty high. THE PUNISHER doesn’t try for the same sort of surreal visual power as Chan Wook Park’s film, and it isn’t drunk on exploitation iconography like Tarantino’s film. THE PUNISHER is pulp, served up gritty and ugly and brutal. It’s not jam-packed full of one-liners. What humor there is in the film is dark. There’s a fist fight in the middle of the film that is wildly violent, deadly serious, but there’s such an abandon to it that you can’t help but laugh. Hensleigh manages to do here what Helgeland almost pulled off with PAYBACK, a modern-day tough guy movie that's actually tough.
The choice to set the film in Tampa instead of New York seems to be a controversial choice with some fans, but I like it. I like seeing this story set in harsh daylight instead of the same rainy, dark city setting that has been recycled a zillion times in recent years. Travolta’s a money launderer, among other things, so it makes sense that he’d be set up on the Gulf of Mexico. I grew up in the Tampa Bay area and Conrad Hall, Jr. shot the hell out of the city. His cinematography is crisp and colorful, but not overly slick. This doesn’t feel like some music video with extra violence, some overly stylized commercial. It’s obvious that the most important thing to Hensleigh is his cast. He makes the most out of everyone, and any director who gets this kind of work out of Travolta deserves some sort of medal. Each action sequence has its own tempo. He’s not out to make the biggest, loudest, craziest rollercoaster ride he can. That’s what something like SPIDER-MAN 2 or HULK is for. THE PUNISHER plays meaner and smaller, a personal story. It’s a $30 million film, after all, not some giant budget summer blockbuster. Maybe the size of the film is the reason they got away with as much as they do.
In the end, the success or failure of this film rests on two pairs of shoulders. Thomas Jane holds up his end of the deal, and his work here should open some doors for the guy finally. He sells a character that is, admittedly, thin by design. He invests Frank with real humanity and also a convincing sense of menace. And Jonathan Hensleigh deserves high marks for focusing on his cast over effects, character over explosions, and substance over style. It's a self-assured debut for him as a filmmaker, and if it represents a turning point in his career, that would be a welcome thing, indeed. You get the feeling watching this that this is where his heart's been all along.
Is there a franchise here? I certainly hope so. This film has a bleak ending, but an open one. If there is another film, it could be something we really haven’t seen before, something awful and apocalyptic. Frank Castle, or whatever he was, has been burned away, leaving behind The Punisher, and Marvel Films is the winner, extending one of the most interesting creative runs in film at the moment.

 

[Pariah]

BIM, do you have a prized comic?

I've got a fairly crappy copy of Hulk 181 (first appearance of Wolverine). I want to upgrade it when I find a decent deal.

BIM, did you pick up "Punisher: The End" last week? It was pretty good. Written by Garth Ennis. Man, that guy's got issues.

Back to the topic: I'm looking forward to the movie, but not epecting much. I do, however, like the casting of Thomas Jane. I think he can pull it off.