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The Punisher
Punishment enough

Starring: Thomas Jane, John Travolta, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Laura Elena Harring, Samantha Mathis, Roy Scheider,
Director: Jonathan Hensleigh
Screenwriters: Jonathan Hensleigh, Gerry Conway, Michael France

Reviewed by Tom Bickle

What a dog. What a turd. What a dog turd. After the end of the movie, I immediately went to rogerebert.com and read his review. Here's why the movie is a turd, and here's where Roger Ebert went right, and where he went wrong.

"Stop Laughing At Me!"

First, my expectations: The Punisher was a Marvel comic that was available when I was growing up. I never read that title much, but I caught enough of it via occasional reads of the title itself and Spiderman crossovers to know the broad strokes of the backstory with certainty: Frank Castle/The Punisher is a cop whose family is brutally killed by the mob, and Castle goes stark raving out of his mind. He is completely and pervasively insane. The comic I remember reading depicts otherwise innocent citizens being gunned down from above for the simple crime of littering. Castle is that bent in the noggin. The Punisher is an utterly depraved lunatic, maniacally bent upon the pure, bloodthirsty revenge of the murder of his family.

Now, I realize that this tone may not pitch well to meetings where money men require PG-13 ratings to maximize the cash they can wring out of their films, but at the very least, the Punisher's morbid depression and insanity could stay true to at least his disdain for those in the mob and directly involved with his family's death. But no.

The Punisher's had his family - not only his wife and child, but his own ma and pa, and extended family - savagely murdered at a big family reunion in Puerto Rico (friggin' Puerto Rico??). He's been shot and exploded and left to drown, but is saved after the local witch doctor fishes his horribly ravaged body out of the water. He grows a beard, heals, (and apparently keeps up the Pilates regimen, because his abs and pecs are fabulous for someone who's laid in bed recovering from near-fatal wounds for several months).

Here's where I knew the movie was seriously off course: after he recovers, he snatches a mob snitch, and threatens to torture information out of him with a blowtorch, advising him the first thing he'll smell is his own smoldering flesh, and that since the intense heat of this method kills nerve endings, the first sensation the underling will feel is intense cold. Pretty creepy, right? Yeah, well, our anti-hero disappears behind his victim, and presses the dastardly weapon of torture to... a T-bone steak. Yeah, a fucking piece of beef. Then (and this is where my faith in the movie shattered), he presses a frigging cherry popsicle to the victim's back, and the victim yelps in his mistaken agony. Oh, the horror!

Sweet mother of God. The real Punisher would have torched a hole right through this geek until he saw daylight out the other side, plucked out his charred spleen, and fed it to the guy. This sissy-Mary Punisher enlists the character's help, trusting that the craven little toady just hates his crime boss sooo much. Give me a break, one time.

This movie, and its hero should have been flat, gunmetal black. No frills, no fancy horseshit, just straight-ahead revenge and hair-raising fuckyouitousness. Instead, it was a glossy, swishy, wannabe-tough, Guys and Dolls sort of tough. I thought Castle was gonna start singing "When you're a Jet, you're as Jet all the waaaay...." and snapping his fingers. This guy wasn't Clint Eastwood tough. He wasn't even Fonzi tough. Dammit!

Roger Ebert got his review so wrong, I have to wonder if he watched it at all. His review was like one of those corporate training exercises, where one person tells another person a story, and another and another, until the person at the end has such a disjointed version of it as to be unrecognizable. Ebert's review seemed like he reviewed the third or fourth telling. Here's where it ran aground:

Ebert reports that "The Punisher" is a long, dark slog through grim revenge. Unlike most movies based on comic book heroes, it doesn't contain the glimmer of a smile". Bull crap. This movie has lots of clumsy grins and goofy smirks, and I hated it for that. From the popsicle scene (I just can't get it out of my head), to a scene where our hero is being beaten to a loosely-connected formation of meaty lumps, while his neighbors next door dance gaily to Italian opera, oblivious to Castle's mutilation, swishing and dipping each other in overly cartoonish fashion while Frank Castle is being ruthlessly stabbed and clubbed to what should be death. This movie is rife with glimmers of smiles, and I wish it were half as dark and grim as he describes.

Ebert continues to say that "The movie is relentless in its violence." Another mistake. From Ebert's description, you'd think it was Faces of Death III. I assure you, it is not. The movie relents plenty of times - besides the popsicle scene (which apparently will haunt me to my grave), there's another scene where the horrible, ruthless evil Bad Guys try to torture information from Castle's plurally-pierced neighbor. Yeah, they yank out the guy's four or five facial piercings, but they do it off-camera, and the guy wriggles and weeps like they're pulling off his testicles. Now, I wasn't looking for something terribly gory, but the Godless, black-garbed heathens left and bragged confidently: "If he knew anything, he woulda talked..." And they cut to a scene where the neighbor is walking, talking, breathing , no broken bones, no nothin'. Wow, the mob must be taking sensitivity courses.

Now, Ebert hit it right when he said the following (and I'm sure he'll sleep better at night knowing he has my approval):

"The film ... is consistently well-acted... Right down the line, the performances are strong..." This, I agree with. How they dragged Travolta into this thing, I'll never know, but he and the hero, Tom Jane, did more for this movie than it deserved.

"The film doesn't simply set up Saint as a bad guy and a target, but devotes attention to the character." That's true too - the characters do get developed. My problem is how they were developed.

"There's so much that's well-done here that you sense a good movie slipping away. That movie would either be lighter than this one, or commit to its seriousness, like "Scarface." This one loses control of its mood and doesn't know what level of credibility it exists on." Also true. This movie either didn't know what notes to hit, or didn't have the confidence to hit them.

As a young comic book reader, I really enjoy seeing their silver screen equivalents succeed, and I regret their failure. I regret this one.

You can find out more about Tom Bickle and read his other prose at www.tombickle.com.

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