The Punisher

I finally caught up with The Punisher last night. Man, I really liked this picture. It seemed like they took a look at Mad Max and Taxi Driver and learned some lessons. It's not perfect -- Frank Castle's kooky neighbors are frequently painful. But they're no worse than the wacky sidekicks action heroes tend to get in Italian and French movies, so they didn't drive me crazy.

John Travolta plays the main antagonist. He is fantastic. Every scene with the bad guys elevated the movie. There's a really cool back-and-forth structure to the conflict between Travolta and Thomas Jane's character. Ordinarily in revenge pics, the hero is helpless in act one, he comes back and menaces the villains in act two, and the hero and villain have a showdown in act three.

In The Punisher, it's more about: Jane does something, Travolta gets him back worse, Jane responds, Travolta sends a killer, Jane survives and fucks with Travolta again, Travolta sends more/better killers, etc. It's a see-saw of dramatic stimulus and response, and I fucking loved it.

Here's something else: when Frank Castle survives the initial hit attempt that turns him into the Punisher, instead of putting on a mask and assuming a secret identity, he shows up on live television. Everyone seems to know where the guy lives. You can find him in the Yellow Pages. Watching this movie, and the way the bad guys show up whenever they want, you come to understand the usefulness of the whole superhero/mask/secret identity thing.

There are some great characters in this movie. The first killer Travolta sends after the Punisher is the "Man from Memphis." He comes into the diner where the Punisher is eating breakfast, sits down and plays a bluegrass song on his guitar about how he's going to kill Jane. And he leaves. It's a good song, and the guy just looks cool and sinister as fuck. He kinda reminded me of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. I dug that guy.

This movie has lots of really smart, unexpected moments. I can't say all of the scenes are perfectly edited, and it looks kinda cheap sometimes -- there are a lot of sequences obviously shot on sound stages. But there was enough cool stuff going on that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I can't wait for the sequel.

I was never a huge fan of the comic. I never thought it met its own awesome potential. The stories always seem to start off well with a lot of crime noir grit, only to inevitably jump the rails into the usual comic book silliness. Perfect example: the first few issues of Punisher War Journal got me excited when it came out in the early-90s. But, by issue ten, it was Frank Castle fighting weirdos with tight outfits and code names, like any other superhero. The Punisher ain't Spider-Man.

Maybe I'm wrong. There might be Punisher graphic novels out there that would kick my ass into the dirt and make me a convert. If so, I'm glad I didn't read them before seeing this movie, because that saved me from the knee jerk "this isn't like the book!" reaction a lot of comic-types suffer from.