Punisher Movie Reviews!

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Washington Post: 'Punisher': Dark Vengeance

 

By Michael O'Sullivan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, April 16, 2004; Page WE41

 

IT ISN'T healthy (or so my therapist tells me) for one grown-up to feel the need to punish another for behavior he deems inappropriate. While the impulse may not be sound, I'm sure it's fairly common, at least based on the perennial popularity of such films as "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Death Wish," "Walking Tall" and "Kill Bill Vol. 2" (see review on this page). What, after all, is the basis for the comic book superhero, most every example of whom decides to embark upon his or her career of righting society's wrongs only after having been traumatized by some personal injury or another?

 

Enter the Punisher, yet another screwed-up Marvel Comics character whose difficult transition from average citizen to costumed (okay, skull-T-shirted) avenger is charted in a new film of the same name. Unlike some of its recent ilk – "Spider-Man," for example – "The Punisher" is, no disrespect, a thoroughly morose and bilious affair. That is precisely what I like best about it.

 

Unlike Spidey, Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) has no Mary Jane Watson to smooth his wrinkled brow at the end of the day. Well, he did at one point, but his wife (Samantha Mathis) is brutally murdered in the film's first half-hour, along with Frank's son, his parents, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, the massacre having taken place during a family reunion on one of Puerto Rico's apparently numerous deserted beaches. Eaten alive by his own need to retaliate against those who have harmed him, Frank then sets out to inflict as much pain as possible on the mobster who ordered his family's murder, Howard Saint (John Travolta).

 

First, Frank strikes at Saint's wallet, giving away the capo's ill-gotten gains. Then, Iago-like, he insinuates untruths about Saint's wife (Laura Harring) and Saint's best friend and consigliere (Will Patton), causing Saint to slowly turn against his own inner circle. Meanwhile, Frank is off dispatching Saint's sundry goons and hit men by such traditional punitive methods as knife, fist, boot, gun, bomb, hot soup and paper-cutter blade.

 

Dumb fun though they may be, these are not the bilious and morose parts I was talking about. My favorite scenes occur quietly inside Frank's squalid apartment building, where our hero, as often as not soused on Wild Turkey, interacts with his three equally misfit neighbors: Dave (Ben Foster), a computer geek with multiple piercings; Bumpo (John Pinette), an obese young opera lover; and Joan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), a mousy waitress with an abusive boyfriend. The quartet's awkward scenes together – at a home-cooked dinner, for instance, at which each person says what he or she is thankful for – are funny and touching. Although director Jonathan Hensleigh and his co-writer, Michael France, could certainly have succumbed to making Frank's freak friends the vehicles for his salvation (Joan, especially, as a cute substitute for Frank's dead wife), they don't.

 

And bless them for it.

 

When "The Punisher" is deep into the parceling out of penance, it is not that different from any one of myriad revenge dramas. But when it shows its antiheroic hero struggling – and failing – to rekindle his flickering humanity, the pleasure we take in his inability to resist his basest instincts is like taking a bite of deliciously dark chocolate: probably bad for us, definitely bitter, but still sweet and stimulating.

 

New York Times

April 16, 2004

MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE PUNISHER'

Only This Hero's Rage Is Superhuman

By A. O. SCOTT

 

he Punisher, a Marvel Comics crime fighter introduced in 1974, is unusual among superheroes (especially Marvel colleagues like Spiderman, the Hulk and the X-Men) for his lack of super powers. His grim, brutal crusade against sundry wrongdoers is enabled not by spider sense or superhuman strength, but by guns, military training and righteous fury.

 

Jonathan Hensleigh's movie version of the Punisher's origins stays true to its hero by being similarly stripped-down, efficient and mean. At a time when comic-book film adaptations have become showcases for the latest computer-assisted special effects, "The Punisher," which opens today nationwide, is a straightforward, somewhat old-fashioned action picture, full of gunfire and hand-to-hand combat, leading to a climax in which several dozen cars explode. The only unusual gadget the hero employs is a portable fire hydrant, which may have some potential as a merchandising tie-in.

 

In any case, "The Punisher," loaded with grim, sadistic violence and more than two hours long, certainly lives up to its name. Played with unsmiling determination by Tom Jane, who exhibits none of the loose charm he showed as Mickey Mantle in "61*" on HBO, the Punisher starts out as Frank Castle, a Special Forces veteran just retired from the F.B.I. His last undercover operation resulted in the accidental death of a suspect who happens to have been the beloved son of a ruthless nightclub owner, money launderer and corporate mogul named Howard Saint.

 

As Saint, John Travolta, a lock of long hair perpetually threatening to fall over his eyes, basically reprises his villainous turn from the toxic "Swordfish" a few years back, with family feeling replacing greed as the character's primary motive for evil-doing. Urged on by his wife (Laura Harring), Saint takes revenge on Castle by wiping out his whole extended family during a reunion in Puerto Rico.

 

Among the dead are Castle's wife (Samantha Mathis), father (Roy Scheider) and young son (Marcus Johns). Mother and son are shown in desperate and prolonged flight from their fates in a scene meant to emphasize the depraved cruelty of the bad guys and to justify the bloody payback that follows.

 

Throughout the picture, we are repeatedly invited to see just how much pleasure the Punisher's enemies — in particular, Saint's right-hand baddie, Quentin Glass (Will Patton) — take in inflicting pain on their victims, so that we can savor the prospect of punishment to follow. But the moral boundary that separates the Punisher — or, for that matter, the filmmakers — from his prey is vaporous, since his acts of vengeance match or exceed the original crimes in their grisly ingenuity.

 

Of course, to make such a point is to entertain nuances and distinctions for which "The Punisher" has no use. 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 few set pieces were clearly meant to have a grisly, Tarantinoesque wit; it hardly seems coincidental that the movie's coldblooded torture artiste is named Quentin. But lightness is not among Mr. Hensleigh's gifts. Making his directorial debut after a successful run as a screenwriter and producer (on projects like "Die Hard With a Vengeance," "Jumanji" and "The Rock") he has clearly conceived "The Punisher" as a throwback to the leathery, angry urban revenge movies of the 1970's.

 

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. The movie comes closest to honoring this tradition in its less operatic sequences (and in one that involves a wall-smashing fight scored to "La donna è mobile"), which is also when it approaches the moodiness and eccentricity of the best Marvel comics.

 

The Punisher, holed up in a warehouse in a gritty part of Tampa, is befriended by his neighbors, three bohemian misfits played by Ben Foster, Jon Pinette and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Their quirky harmlessness and easy recognition of Castle as a fellow outsider give a touch of sweetness and humanity to a movie that is otherwise remorselessly ugly and punishingly inhumane.