| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE PUNISHER
Rating: 
USA/Germany/Canada. 2004.
Director – Jonathan Hensleigh, Screenplay – Jonathan Hensleigh & Michael France, Based on the Comic Book Created by Gerry Conway, Producers – Avi Arad & Gale Ann Hurd, Photography – Conrad W. Hall, Music – Carlo Siliotto, Music Supervisor – David Jordan, Visual Effects – Fantasy II Film Effects (Supervisor – Gene Warren Jr), Special Effects Supervisor – Kevin Harris, Makeup Effects – Matthew W. Mungle, Production Design – Michael Z. Hanan. Production Company – Marvel Enterprises/Valhalla Motion Pictures/Film and VIP 2 Co Medienfonds GmBh/Film and VIP 3 Co Medienfonds GmBh/Lions Gate Films.
Cast:
Thomas Jane (Frank Castle), John Travolta (Howard Saint), Will Patton (Quentin Glass), Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Joan), Ben Foster (Dave), John Pinette (Bumpo), Laura Harring (Livia Saint), Eddie Jemison (Mickey Duka), Samantha Mathis (Maria Castle), Roy Scheider (Frank Castle Sr), Mark Collie (Harry Heck), Kevin Nash (The Russian), Marcus Johns (Will Castle)
Plot: FBI agent Frank Castle is undercover to bust an arms dealing operation but this ends in a shootout. One of those killed turns out to be the son of wealthy underworld banker Howard Saint. Saint swears vengeance and tracks Frank down to Puerto Rico where he is holidaying with his family and has his men massacre the entire family and leave Frank for dead. However Frank survives and returns to Tampa where he takes a room in a rundown tenement, arms himself and begins taking violent revenge against Saint’s organization. At the same time the three other tenants in the house befriend the grim and tight-lipped Frank, but this is something that serves to make them targets for Saint’s men.
The immense success of X-Men (2000) created a great deal of interest in the cinematic potential of Marvel Comics properties. From there we went to the massively successful Spider-Man (2002), followed by adaptations of Daredevil (2003) and Hulk (2003) and subsequent to The Punisher, Elektra (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), Man-Thing (2005), Ghost Rider (2007) and Iron Man (2008).
The Punisher first appeared in Amazing Spiderman #129 in February 1974. In that story, The Punisher was actually the villain of the piece who was stalking Spiderman, believing him to be a murderer. The response to the character was positive and Frank Castle/The Punisher made return appearances up against various other characters in the Marvel universe. The Punisher had been inspired by Don Pendleton’s The Executioner thrillers, from which Marvel subsequently virtually zeroxed the origin story of a character seeking violent vigilante justice for the murder of his family by Mafia. Marvel were reluctant to grant The Punisher his own series, with many higher-ups in the company finding the concept of a murderous, ultra-violent vigilante contrary to Marvel’s family line. However when those responsible were finally allowed to do a limited five issue series in 1986, it proved a best-seller and The Punisher has remained at the forefront of the Marvel lineup ever since. By the mid-1990s, The Punisher was appearing in three simultaneous series and various graphic novel specials, including a crossover into the DC Universe to face Batman and at one point even a meeting with quintessential comic book Boy Next Door-type Archie. The character previously appeared on screen in The Punisher (1990), starring Dolph Lundgren in the title role. Although the character was shorn of his trademark black skull costume in the film, this was a highly enjoyable adaptation that strode a fine line between dark avenging psychosis and the tongue-in-cheek.
This version of The Punisher is a collaboration between Marvel’s specially formed film production wing and Gale Ann Hurd’s Valhalla Motion Pictures (who also co-produced the recent adaptation of Marvel’s Hulk). The Punisher is the directorial debut of Jonathan Hensleigh. Jonathan Hensleigh began as a scriptwriter on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-3) and then branched out with scripts for films such as Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Jumanji (1995), The Saint (1997) and Armageddon (1998), as well as acting as an executive producer on various Jerry Bruckheimer action vehicles. Hensleigh subsequently went onto direct the horror film Welcome to the Jungle (2007).
The Punisher is a somewhat uneven film. Though he has had a more than exemplary background as a scriptwriter and producer of big-budget action films, Jonathan Hensleigh proves somewhat less assured when it actually comes to directing such action scenes himself. Various sequences such as the chase that culminates in the shooting of Castle’s wife and son and the showdown with Harry Heck are all fairly routinely directed as action movies go. It is only at the climax of the film that Hensleigh touches upon a genuine sense of comic-bookish action – with Thomas Jane going into action with a bow and arrow, slashing opponents throats in welts of blood across the wall, impaling victims with a knife that can be seen coming up through their throat into their mouth, and leaving John Travolta tied to a burning car and being dragged across a lot as he detonates explosives that leave the entire lot aflame in the shape of a burning skull seen from above. The Punisher is frequently and expectedly a quite violent film. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s a quite nasty scene where Will Patton has Ben Foster at knifepoint and starts ripping out his piercings. But the rest of the time the film rarely touches upon the comic-bookish – indeed Frank Castle seems only really a big-budget version of Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) with a cool T-shirt.
There’s a good amount of time when Jonathan Hensleigh misjudges the tone and the film falls into the campy – a scene where Thomas Jane has Eddie Jamison tied up and makes him think he is being tortured by cooking a steak with a blowtorch and applying a popsicle to his back; and especially the scene where he takes on wrestler Kevin Nash in a bash-up match that demolishes most of the apartment block, a sequence that frequently verges on the slapstick. It is here that Hensleigh either seems to be trying to pull back on scenes that could have been much nastier and grimmer and go for a misjudged comic-bookish tone or the cutsie or both. A scene where Thomas Jane deals with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’s bullying boyfriend and merely grabs his switchblade and taps him on the forehead with it saying “You shouldn’t play with knives” really comes out quite laughably. And elsewhere there are simply too many scenes with the unnecessary comic relief of Castle’s three neighbours, scenes that, when Hensleigh stops the comedy, turn really quite sentimental.
The Punisher is certainly the darkest of the whole run of Dark Avenging Superheroes and predated The Dark Knight (1986) where DC Comics patented the look with their revision of Batman. Alas Jonathan Hensleigh seems really quite unattuned to the whole Dark Avenger ethos. The film is too long and neither dark nor kinetic enough to work effectively. Thomas Jane certainly gives a brooding, if lantern-jawed, Frank Castle, but it is not very often that the film seems to inhabit the psychological darkness of the Dark Avenger comic-book. The film does have the benefit of John Travolta as the villain of the show. Travolta is good, but the villain role he fills really ends up being quite routine as a nemesis and certainly not of the stature that one expects of an actor of Travolta’s calibre – compare Travolta’s performance here to the way Jack Nicholson filled the villain role in Batman (1989) or Danny DeVito in Batman Returns (1992). Clearly the producers were hoping to get more from John Travolta’s casting than they succeeded in imagining for him to do.
Of the two films, it is really The Punisher 90 that is the better film, even though it discarded the character’s costume, never concerned itself with an origin story and was the lesser budgeted of the two. It at least had a perfect sense of the comic-bookish and delved into the dark avenging vigilante psychology; The Punisher 04 by comparison looks more like another big-budget action film than it ever does a comic-book adaptation.
The Punisher was a reasonable hit and a sequel, The Punisher: War Zone (2008), has been announced.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
|