 |
|
|
|
|
The Punisher |
|
The Punisher is yet another action-heavy movie based on a
Marvel comic book character. The comic has been around since the 80s,
and it's a very violent and hard-boiled strip starring an ex-cop Vietnam
Vet named Frank Castle. He and his family were killed by mobsters when
they witnessed a crime, or at least so the mobsters thought. The wife
and kids died, but Frank Castle lived, to be reborn as The Punisher.
He lives for revenge and for vigilante justice, and he's not a
superhero; he doesn't have any magical or mutant powers; he's just a
hard guy with a lot of weapons. Sort of like Batman actually, minus the
gothic touches and tool belt; The Punisher just shots or knifes
people to death, old school style. Was the movie any good? Not really. Did it have some cool things and
the potential to be pretty cool? Definitely. To the scores. (Click
here to see these
categories explained.) The Punisher With an improved script and plot, this could have been a really solid
action movie, with some quirky sub characters, some unconventional
happenings, and some quality action sequences. Unfortunately, for all
the good the script did by making most of the characters much more
interesting than your usual stock action guys, it threw in numerous
utterly boring and predictable events, far too much character-based
stuff, and an unnecessarily-convoluted revenge plot with several twists
that no one asked for. Still, the movie had potential, and with a
quality rewrite this one could have been a classic cheesy action movie. More on the film in a bit. I actually wanted to see this film. While I read a few issues of the
comic decades ago, back in the 1980s, I haven't seen it (or any comics)
in at least fifteen years, and I didn't have any expectation of quality
when news leaked that they were working on a Punisher film. Then when
the first teaser images of The Punisher came out, and the unknown
star, Thomas Jane, looked like a wimp, I pretty well wrote the film off.
I still watched the teaser trailer when it came online, but since it
wasn't very good, I had no hope that the full trailer would change my
mind. Surprisingly, it did, and after my first, "You know,
that wasn't bad." reaction, I watched the trailer a dozen more
times over the next few weeks, then watched the film clips, and enjoyed
them. Could the movie actually be worth seeing? Even with John Travolta
as the chief bad guy? It didn't seem possible, but I wavered on
the edge of wanting to see it until the release date was finalized, and
it turned out that The Punisher, little-known comic book revenge
tale, was opening the same day as Kill Bill Volume Two. Much better
known comic book style revenge tale. Nice job on the scheduling
there, kids. Predictably
enough, Kill Bill 2 opened at #1, with $25m, while The
Punisher limped in with $14m, and with poor reviews (28%,
41/144 positive on Rotten Tomatoes) it dropped like a stone after
week one, finishing the US theatrical run with just $34m. I never saw it
in the theaters, largely because it opened against another action
revenge flick, I was dying to see Kill Bill 2, and when it got great
reviews and The Punisher got the shaft I forgot about paying $8
for the privilege. I didn't forget the film though, and when the
DVD came out I kept my eye on it, and when Blockbuster dumped dozens of
used DVDs into their discount bin on a 3 for $25 sale, we picked up The
Punisher along with two other titles. So why didn't it work? It tried to hard, mostly. Plot spoilers
follow, but trust me, you won't be watching this one for the
brilliant plot. In fact, I gave it a 7 on Replayability solely because
the plot is so stupid that there's no way anyone will sit through this
film in it's entirety more than once. You'll just skip to the good parts
and skip over the crappy exposition and attempts at intrigue. The basic story is that Frank Castle is an undercover federal
officer. He sets up a weapon sale to an underworld guy, gets busted
along with the buyer, and as part of his cover gets shot by blanks to
fake his own death. Unluckily for him, one of the buyers is the son of a
money laundering megacrook, played by John Travolta. The son gets
nervous during the bust, pulls his gun, and gets killed. The bust was
Castle's last job before retirement, and he heads off after a going away
party, happy to be clear of the dangerous business. Unluckily for Castle, Travolta is not happy about his dead son, and
he uses his money and connections to find out that the supposed gun
seller was an undercover cop, and he orders his guys to kill Castle at
his family reunion, before his wife ups the ante by telling them (while
in her black veil, at her son's funereal) to wipe out Castle's whole
family. While it's necessary for the plot, Travolta's rage at Castle
seems ridiculous. Of course he wants to get the man responsible for his
son's death, but Castle didn't pull the trigger, and he didn't entrap
Travolta's son. A bumbling sidekick of the family is the one who
actually set up the gun sale to enrich himself, and Travolta's son only
went along since he wanted to impress daddy. If I were Travolta and I
were making up a list of who was most responsible for my son's death,
Castle would be about sixth on the list, after the bodyguard who was
never supposed to leave the son alone (who Travolta kills), the sidekick
who set up the sale, the cops who actually shot the son, etc. I think
the plot would have worked a lot better if Castle had actually shot the
kid himself; I suppose they wanted to make him entirely blameless in the
whole thing to make the slaughter of his family more uncalled for and
his vengence more deserved, but instead of creating moral ambiguity (The
Punisher is very much an anti-hero, after all.) they just made
Travolta's anger seem misplaced. So Travolta's men head to the Puerto Rican island that the Castle
family reunion is on, and they gun down everyone but Castle, his dad,
and his wife and kid. Castle and dad are in the house and they fight
back and kill a few of the attackers, and his wife and kid make it to a
truck and drive like hell to get away. Of course the bad guys see them
and pursue and catch and murder them, with Castle arriving a minute too
late to save them, but in plenty of time to get beaten up, shot several
times, and nearly immolated in gasoline. He survives, of course, after a
local black magic guy finds him (Really; though any supernatural element
you might have hoped for begins and ends right there.) and a month or so
later Castle is back, completely healed save for a limp. He walks
through the site of the shooting and finds the Punisher t-shirt his son
gave him just before he died, washed up on the shore line. How it got
into the water and was still there a month or two later is left
unanswered, but since the kid said it was some sort of talisman to ward
off evil creatures, you're thinking this will all tie in with the black
magic voodoo healer priest. Nope, it's never mentioned again. Remember
what I said about the movie trying to do too much? The action thus far, which is nothing but set up for the second act,
has taken at least an hour, which is at least 30 minutes too long.
There's way too much time spent with the Castle family before the
shooting, there's way too much time spent with the emotionless Travolta
pseudo-mourning his son, and there's way too much time spent before
Castle starts enacting his revenge. So Castle's alive and he heads back to Tampa Bay where Travolta is
headquartered. Somehow Castle now has infinite resources; he has every
sort of gun and ammo, bombs, grenades, high tech military hardware, and
so on. We find out later that he did numerous tours with the Special
Forces and specialized in anti-terrorist ops, which played perfectly
into his career as an undercover guy. It's also meant to explain how
he's able to infiltrate and spy and plot his overly-elaborate revenge,
but since all of that stuff just seems ridiculous when it happens, it's
the movie trying to do too much again. The entire Tampa section of the film seemed like it was missing a
character; some old military buddy to help Castle out. Not a full on
sidekick, but someone to give him money, sell him guns and bombs, etc.
As it is, with his entire family dead and himself presumed dead, we're
left wondering how the hell he gets all the hardware. We also assume
he's keeping his survival secret so he can get his revenge without
anyone knowing who he is... but then after he mock-tortures the bad guy
sidekick, a weasel who promptly befriends Castle since he doesn't like
Travolta since he's been turned into a suck ass lackey since he got
Travolta's son killed, Castle immediately rips his own gravestone out
and dumps it on the golf course Travolta plays on. Where Travolta is the
first to see it, despite the fact that it's obviously about noon when he
gets to the hole, and every golf course on earth has dozens of
groundskeepers roaming around, other golfers playing, etc. Okay, silly but dramatic, and maybe Castle wants Travolta to know
he's coming for him to give him some fear. That doesn't work very well
since Travolta spend the entire movie impersonating an android and never
changes expression, much less seems sad, happy, scared, pensive, etc.
But any chance of understanding Castle's logic ends when he stalks up to
some sort of press conference with the chief of Tampa police, and
demands to know why his family has been dead for a month and there
haven't been any arrests. This scene is ludicrous on numerous levels, but besides the obvious
drawback of blowing his cover and putting his face on the evening news,
what the hell is the Tampa Bay police chief going to do about the murder
of an American family in Puerto Rico? It's entirely out of his
jurisdiction, and it just reminds us that we'd initially expected to see
several hundred federal agents swarming all over the scene of the Castle
family execution. After all, Frank Castle was a highly-decorated
ex-soldier, and an important federal agent who was murdered several days
after he retired. It would be a huge national case, and nothing for the
Tampa police to be involved in, unless they were cooperating by
providing foot soldiers for some larger investigation. After the chief says, "Now now Frank, I can see that you're
upset." Frank goes off on a little rant about, "Upset? I used
to get upset when I was stuck in traffic, or when the Yankees won the
series..." The writers obviously thought it was clever, and it's
not bad writing, but it seems entirely out of character since thus far
Castle has been almost monosyllabic, and why on earth is he wasting time
and exposing himself by arguing with the impotent chief of police
anyway? The scene concludes with... Frank just walking away. From there the movie really goes oddly, since we're expecting him to
start punishing people. Travolta's character, for starters, and maybe
his family too, since Castle is supposed to be all hardcore and burnt
out and suicidal with his family dead. He drinks and sulks all through
the rest of the movie, but since he's hardly any more expressive than
Travolta, you can't distinguish his "Sorrow at everyone I ever
loved being gunned down." from his "What did I have for lunch
yesterday?" expression. Thomas Jane's lack of acting ability isn't
a real problem though, since no one wants him acting anyway. This is an
action/revenge picture, after all. Emotions are for the weak, damnit.
Quit sitting in your second story garage/apartment and start killing bad
guys, damnit. More unnecessary characters come in with his three wacky apartment
mates. There's the battered woman/waitress, played by Rebecca Romjin, in
utterly-inexplicable casting. She's never seen in any sexy clothing,
never seen other than full dressed, and never really even in makeup. So
why hire a supermodel/actress if you're going to put her in baggy
dresses and have her play ugly? Aren't there real actresses out there
who could have done the role with real emotion for about 1/50th the
price? Besides Romjin's non-romantic interest, there's a fat guy
who appears to be some sort of chef, at least some of the time, and a
troubled geeky little guy with a lot of facial piercings, ten thousand
dollars in high tech equipment in a $200 rathole apartment, and severe
lingering childhood issues. None of these characters are even a tiny bit
plausible, but they're much more interesting than the sidekicks in most
movies. Unfortunately this is just more overwriting; with the script
working too hard to make the diversions fun, while neglecting the main
plot. The sidekicks and Castle do some bonding while he gets in the news for killing people, and he moves deeper into his overall revenge plot. And it's as overwritten and absurd as most of the movie. Castle gets inside information from the weasel bad guy sidekick he sort of tortured earlier, and begins carrying out surveillance of Travolta's wife, and best friend/chief lieutenant. He spies on them, learns their patterns and routines, but not to kill them in spectacular fashion. No, he's plotting deeper than that, and by some spy camera shots, blackmail threats, car theft, and breaking and entering, he manages to plant sufficient evidence that Travolta thinks his wife is cheating on him with his best friend/lieutenant, who happens to be gay, unbeknownst to Travolta. Meanwhile, Travolta is sending hit men after Castle. Hit men who somehow know exactly where he lives, but since they're colorful hit men, they can't just shoot him in the head. No, the first one comes into the diner where Romjin's character works, which appears to be downstairs from the apartments, but might be somewhere else entirely. The geeky piercing guy and the fat guy are the only other two customers there, in any event. Hit Man #1 plays the catchy folk song about death and murder that features large in The Punisher trailer, then leaves after making a veiled death threat towards Castle. Cut to Castle sitting in his car waiting for a draw bridge to lower, and the hit man driving up behind him, very fast, in his hot rod 60s car. An action scene commences, with Castle barely surviving. It's a good scene, but since the bad guys magically know where he lives, he's got to move, right? Of course not. He does more espionage towards Travolta, and is surprised a couple of days later, after a long and relatively pointless dinner with the 3 apartment sidekicks, when "The Russian," a gigantic hitman, shows up and starts fighting him. The Russian doesn't use any weapons, preferring to go in armed with nothing more than platinum blonde hair, muscles on top of muscles, and a white and red striped Russian sailor shirt. They fight in entertaining fashion, with all of Castle's secret weapons and tricks availing him naught, but the whole time you're thinking, "Why the hell didn't Travolta just have Castle shot? Or blow up his entire apartment building?" Castle wins the fight, barely, but of course he's badly wounded and lots more bad guys, this time with guns, are coming up the stairs. The three sidekicks want to help him, and they discover a totally unexplainable electric lift in the center of his floor. It's like an elevator with no cable to lift it, and the top of it looks like the floor. Basically it's a power trap door with a secret compartment that's large enough to put a motorcycle on. How this exists below the floor of a rat hole 2nd story apartment is completely unimaginable, but perhaps there was an explanation for it in some other version of The Punisher's script development. At any rate, the girl rides down the secret trap door floor thing with the unconscious Castle on it, while the fat guy and the geek sit on top of it, waiting for the bad guys. Why they don't call the police, drag Castle into another apartment, flee the building, hide in their own rooms, all hide in the trap door, etc is as inexplicable as everything else in the movie. Also head-slappingly stupid is the fact that when the bad guys walk in the two sidekicks sit motionless and silent. All they had to do was walk around looking shocked at the destroyed apartment and say they heard an explosion and came over to look and saw Castle run out the front, and the bad guys would be off after him. Instead they sit there, silent, and when questioned the geek says, "I'm not saying shit." which of course simply tells the bad guys that he's got a secret. They torture him by pulling out his facial piercings with a pair of pliers, but when he doesn't talk they just figure he must not know anything, and all but one of them leave. Without killing the geek or the fat guy, or even threatening them with death. These are the same bad guys who gunned down upwards of 20 innocent Castle family members a few months ago. Which reminds me of another plot issue; Travolta is a money launderer, and aside from some tense arguments with the Cubans whose money he's lost thanks to Castle's interference, and his desire for revenge after his son's death, he's a completely non-violent banker. He has a lot of money, enough to own a building and a huge night club, but how he got it remains a mystery, as does his need for a private army, and their willingness to act as executioners. Basically, the plot requires Travolta to have a bunch of murderous automaton goons so that they can kill Castle's family, and in turn be killed by The Punisher. The fact that it's ridiculous on numerous levels is just never addressed. The final act finally begins after Castle wakes up after about three hours, and then emerges from the floor trap door and kills the one guard left behind, who has apparently been pacing up and down the hallway and smoking for the better part of the day, while the fat guy and the now piercing-less geek sat and bled in Castle's apartment, which is simply full of guns and weapons. Fully healed of the twenty or thirty broken bones, the stab wound, and the burst ear drums he suffered in the fight with The Russian, he sets off to finish the job, immediately arriving at Travolta's club, where he promptly crawls beneath the hundreds of cars in the parking lot, loading them all with remote controlled explosive charges. Of course the origin of all of these cars is a total mystery, since Travolta previously said, after killing his best friend and wife since he believed the evidence Castle planted, "Close the club and call everyone in; we're going hunting." "Everyone" seems to be about 10 guys in black suits, and their "hunting" is nothing but sitting in an upstairs lounge drinking champagne and staring at the suitcase full of cash Travolta brought in to pay them for helping to kill Castle. The Punisher of course infiltrates the club effortlessly, showing off his archery skills as he shoots a few guards outside, then sends up a bomb in a champagne bucket and runs up the stairs and guns down all the bad guys as they're rolling around, in shock from the explosion. He kills a few of them with some imagination, then catches up to Travolta outside and shoots him down in Old West style, before tying him to the back of a car that he rolls through the lot, while hundreds of other cars explode and burn on all sides of it, explosions that form a giant Punisher skull shape when viewed from the sky, as the carnage is before the fade to black. The last scene in the movie shows Castle standing on top of a bridge beside his car (which was totaled earlier in the film) while his voiceover talks about how criminals that prey upon the weak must now fear... The Punisher. Clearly a scene designed to do nothing but set up sequels, which will probably not appear since while the movie made about $55m worldwide, even with the DVD revenues it probably won't earn more than it cost to make and promote.
My long summary here was intended to save you the trouble of watching the movie, while explaining why it just didn't work. It didn't suck, and it had some nice scenes, but most of it was just so pointless. The writers tried hard, but they didn't know if they wanted to make an action film, or a comedy, or an espionage thriller, or a revenge movie, or what. It's got elements that work in every genre, but all together they just jumble the film into nonsense. The tone never settles down; it's gruesome at times, then dead serious, then full of genre-defying jokes, then exciting with action, then mentally-stimulating as the plot attempts to twist. It's like the director and the writer threw in everything including the kitchen sink and loved it all too much to make any cuts. You regularly hear about how some studio forced a director to hack up his masterpiece, cutting half an hour or more since they didn't share his vision, etc. That's generally a bad idea, but in the case of The Punisher, I wonder where the studio was. In the first place, they should have demanded script rewrites to get rid of the whole overly-complicated trick plot that drove Travolta to kill his best friend and wife, since it just didn't work and seemed completely out of character, as well as streamlining all of the revenge sections, especially those involving magically-appearing hitmen. But even assuming I couldn't touch the script, I would have cut at least 30 minutes out of the final film. The opening is too long, the family reunion, pre-massacre, could drop 10 minutes without effort, there's way too much time spent on the quirky but entirely irrelevant apartment neighbors, there are at least five too many scenes of Travolta speaking through clenched lips while trying to appear sad or angry, there is far too much of Castle drinking and looking glum, and so on. This film isn't worth the effort, but while thinking back over it after my first viewing, I kept thinking about that fan-edited version of Star Wars Episode One, in which some guy tried to salvage the film by editing out every bit of Jar Jar's performance. I don't know how well that worked, and I don't think it would be possible to make The Punisher a good movie without a rewrite and extensive additional filming, but the movie could definitely go from a 5 to a 7 if someone removed 30 minutes of unnecessary material and focused the story more professionally.
Pre-Movie Discussion The Punisher? I have to say that I'm surprised to ever find myself writing about this one. I thought the early pictures of the star looked pouty and ridiculous, and the teaser trailer was crap, but I have to admit that the full trailer for The Punisher is pretty damn good, and growing on me with each viewing. The revenge picture is about the oldest genre in Hollywood, but it's still fun. Most people love to see some nice guy/girl get screwed over, and then take his/her bloody, but oh-so-justified revenge. And that's really all this one is about, minus the cheesy cuteness that QT couldn't resist putting into Kill Bill. I want to see The Punisher get hurt, and then I want to see him blow shit up, fight, and kill motherfuckers. And really, is that so bad? Must you deny me that simple pleasure? The Punisher looks like the early Schwarzenegger movies, the ones before he got too famous and tried to become a comedy star, and way before he got too old and became stretched-looking. Trashy films like Conan the Barbarian and Raw Deal and Commando. Just a big, muscular, tough guy beating or slicing or shooting the shit out of various people who deserved to have the shit beaten or sliced or shot out of them. I'd do a whole trailer analysis as I recently did for the misguided Around the World in 80 Days or the disastrous Garfield the Movie trailers, but The Punisher trailer is solid. True, the last minute of tired-sounding Nü Metal would have been better with music that was less tired and less identical to every other Nü Metal song ever recorded, but the opening with the acoustic guitar and folk song is nice, and the editing is good, and the action scenes are nice, and the whole plot isn't given away and all the best stunts aren't shown and you're left wondering how he's going to kill so many bad guys and how he's going to beat that gigantic Russia guy who dents the barrel of his gun. Plus, once you watch it and enjoy it, you'll note the total absence of any cheesy voice over narration, and the almost total absense of John Travolta's puffy face. The voice over is my personal pet peeve, since one of those happy idiots talking is always a sure sign of a shit trailer, and any 2.5 minutes of movie promotion that can be put together using nothing but sound effects and movie dialogue is almost certainly the product of some talent from the film maker, and a decent movie to work with.
In other upcoming movie news, The Punisher is opening the same day as Kill Bill 2, and I'm looking forward to it as well. IFilm has 4 short clips online now, and all four of them are pretty damn good. They're even well-selected, with two of them ending with the Punisher down and looking about to be killed, with no apparent way out. Interesting clips, but not spoilery; they make you want to watch more without giving away too much. Well, that's my reaction anyway.
The movie has been out for three days, and I guess I've given up on sitting through The Punisher. I was eager to go after the second trailer and the film clips, and Malaya was willing to come along, but since we both really wanted to see KB2, we went and saw it first. And while I could ignore some bad reviews for Punisher, 26% (29/110) positive is a bit of a stretch, especially since most of the bad reviews say it's just overlong and boring and poorly-paced and no fun. So we'll wait and rent it on DVD in a few months, and probably be glad we didn't pay $16 to see it in the theater. We had thought about waiting a week to see Punisher, since there's nothing opening this weekend or the week after that we want to see, but with stuff one or the other of us is eager for every weekend from May 7th through June, it's not like skipping one movie is going to kill us. |
|
| Return to the Reviews Index. |
|
All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
