The Punisher (2004)
Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh
When undercover FBI agent Frank Castle's wife and son are slaughtered, he becomes 'the Punisher' -- a ruthless vigilante willing to go to any length to avenge his family.
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The bad guys strike while Castle’s is at a family reunion in Puerto Rico, killing everyone, including his wife and son (in a scene that totally rips off George Miller’s “Mad Max”).
And then there’s the issue of the film’s maddening and repeated homages to George Miller’s Mad Max – the sequence featuring the death of Castle’s wife and son is an exacting re-creation of the same scene in Miller’s vastly superior (and equally grim) film, as is this film’s final act of explosive vengeance.
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).
And harking back to the likes of Death Wish and Dirty Harry, the film is refreshing in this age of cockamamie political correctness in the un-PC way it appeals to the righteousness of viewers who want to see innocence protected, evil defeated and the guilty to suffer.
It helps to consider The Punisher comic book itself from the perspective of when it debuted: 1974, the era of movies like Dirty Harry, Death Wish and yes, Walking Tall.
In attempting to appeal to a wider audience, The Punisher never quite becomes the 21st century's answer to Death Wish.
After all, blowing things up is what movies do best, and if you connect a good sense of payback to it -- as in Death Wish, for example -- it can be a delicious guilty pleasure.
It's based on the Marvel comic book; it could easily be mistaken for an update of "Death Wish," with Jane's Frank Castle -- once "the finest undercover op" in Tampa -- trying to take down slimy, ultrawealthy Howard Saint (Travolta), whose henchmen turned Castle's family reunion into a multi-generational massacre.
It's a bit of mind-boggling mayhem that recalls the Nicolas Cage/Randall "Tex" Cobb mismatch in "Raising Arizona" and the legendary James Gandolfini/Patricia Arquette throwdown in "True Romance."
It helps to consider The Punisher comic book itself from the perspective of when it debuted: 1974, the era of movies like Dirty Harry, Death Wish and yes, Walking Tall.
In the ''Dirty Harry'' and ''Death Wish'' pictures of that era -- also the time of the Punisher's comic-book birth -- gracelessness functioned as a sign of macho integrity.
And harking back to the likes of Death Wish and Dirty Harry, the film is refreshing in this age of cockamamie political correctness in the un-PC way it appeals to the righteousness of viewers who want to see innocence protected, evil defeated and the guilty to suffer.
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If Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies echo the kung-fu flicks of the 1960s and 1970s, "Punisher" is highly reminiscent of the low-grade, low-budget Golan and Globus productions that cluttered up screens throughout the 1980s.
It's fascinating that The Punisher is being released on the same day as Kill Bill: Vol. 2 -- the latter film takes inspiration from the same third-rate drive-in schlock embodied by the former.
Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes ''Kill Bill'' look like ''In the Bedroom.''
A blond Russian hitman (wrestler Kevin Nash) has a comical throwdown with the Punisher set to Verdi’s “La Donna E Mobile,” and though the scene provides a momentary respite from Carlo Siliotto’s drearily melancholic score, it’s unclear whether this Russkie’s physical similarity to Rocky IV‘s Drago (who was played by Dolph Lundgren, star of the original 1989 B-movie version of The Punisher) is intentional or not.
At this point, when Travolta says "Bring in The Russian," I was hoping that Dolph Lundgren (the original "Punisher") would break down the door and enter as Ivan Drago from "Rocky IV" to liven things up a bit.
Children are shot in the back, mothers are run down like animals, a heroic geek is tortured mercilessly, and the final reward of at least a couple of the baddies would make Dario Argento blush (indeed, a knife-through-the-chin gag from Opera is ripped off with gory gusto).
With off-the-shelf shootout and showdown scenes that differ from any other over-the-top action fare only in their gloomy lighting, "The Punisher" can't begin to measure up to the popcorn vengeance of Mel Gibson's Payback or the moody, provocative, primal reprisal of Steven Soderbergh's The Limey In fact, even the cheap, cheesy 1989 B-movie adaptation of the same Marvel comic book (with dramatically lumbering Dolph Lungren in the title role) was more entertainingly bad than this picture.
A blond Russian hitman (wrestler Kevin Nash) has a comical throwdown with the Punisher set to Verdi’s “La Donna E Mobile,” and though the scene provides a momentary respite from Carlo Siliotto’s drearily melancholic score, it’s unclear whether this Russkie’s physical similarity to Rocky IV‘s Drago (who was played by Dolph Lundgren, star of the original 1989 B-movie version of The Punisher) is intentional or not.
In 1989, Dolph Lundgren starred in a B-movie take on “The Punisher,” but given the resources applied to this year’s model, couldn’t we have expected something other than a B-movie gussied up with some big names and bigger explosions?
The Punisher is such a bad film that it becomes inadvertently entertaining; it’s enough to make you pine for the original version of the black-clad Marvel Comics’ badass, played to awful imperfection in 1989 by Dolph Lundgren.
Based on the Marvel comic that was borne out of the mid-70s heyday of Bronson and violent revenge movies in general, this second big-screen version of The Punisher is not only an infinite improvement over the awful 1989 film adaptation starring Dolph Lundgren, but also one of the best films ever to be based on a comic book.
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It helps to consider The Punisher comic book itself from the perspective of when it debuted: 1974, the era of movies like Dirty Harry, Death Wish and yes, Walking Tall.
The difference is that Commando knew it was bad.