The problem with comic book movies has always been maintaining the balance between the original source material with its bountiful detail and the simplicity of an introductory film.
The Punisher is a simple story: Vietnam veteran Frank Castle witnesses the unintentional murder of his family by mafiosos and dedicates his life to destroying criminals. Emphasis on destroy.
The Punisher was a product of 1970s nihilism and is probably the only Marvel character to actually kill his opponents. In this day and age, this sensibility is more than a little foreign and in the translation of the book to film it shows.
The script is based VERY loosely on Garth Ennis' brilliant Welcome Back Frank series and the origin story. Part of the problem is that the story of WBF deals with a Frank Castle who has 20+ years of slaughter under his belt and goes back to his old ways after a brief character shift in the Marvel universe (complicated and unnecessary to reveal here), and his reputation adds to his presence. In the film, Frank has just picked up the mantle of vengeance-seeker and is extremely clumsy in his work. Secondly, WBF was written by Garth Ennis, a writer whose knack for grotesquerie exceeds the confines of even an NC-17 rated movie, so selecting his story as a basis for a script is ludicrous because his incredibly gory humor can't translate very well to mainstream audiences; and without that, the story loses it's punch AND its lifeforce.
The only semblance of this exists in a fight between The Punisher and The Russian, a prominent character whose size and idiocy is a neverending source of comic relief in the book; unfortunately, he is a minor and disposable character here who does manage to create humor through various double-take inducing feats of strength, but nowhere near to the level he should.
Frank Castle himself is unrecognizable. The Punisher from the Marvel world is a battle-tested maniac who borders on insanity and uses lethal force in MacGyverian fashion. Thomas Jane plays him as a brooding rogue cop who clearly possesses too little ingenuity to be dangerous and too much humanity to be menacing. In the film version, Castle uses sleight of hand to subdue a knife-wielding abusive boyfriend when the comic-book Castle would have shoved his face through the back of his skull. The rest of the characters are mere shadows of their comic book selves, and many of them, including Saint and Quentin, don't even exist in the book! In short, the film is an appalling collection of action movie clichés, action movie production values, and action movie coincidences to further the plot that they may as well have not even bothered to adapt an actual source material. The pitch-black humor and perversity found in Ennis' story have been stripped away to create a Frank Castle that won't offend too many mainstream moviegoers by being too brutal, a character trait that, let's face it, is the primary reason people liked The Punisher in the first place.
Not worth the price of admission.
The Punisher is a simple story: Vietnam veteran Frank Castle witnesses the unintentional murder of his family by mafiosos and dedicates his life to destroying criminals. Emphasis on destroy.
The Punisher was a product of 1970s nihilism and is probably the only Marvel character to actually kill his opponents. In this day and age, this sensibility is more than a little foreign and in the translation of the book to film it shows.
The script is based VERY loosely on Garth Ennis' brilliant Welcome Back Frank series and the origin story. Part of the problem is that the story of WBF deals with a Frank Castle who has 20+ years of slaughter under his belt and goes back to his old ways after a brief character shift in the Marvel universe (complicated and unnecessary to reveal here), and his reputation adds to his presence. In the film, Frank has just picked up the mantle of vengeance-seeker and is extremely clumsy in his work. Secondly, WBF was written by Garth Ennis, a writer whose knack for grotesquerie exceeds the confines of even an NC-17 rated movie, so selecting his story as a basis for a script is ludicrous because his incredibly gory humor can't translate very well to mainstream audiences; and without that, the story loses it's punch AND its lifeforce.
The only semblance of this exists in a fight between The Punisher and The Russian, a prominent character whose size and idiocy is a neverending source of comic relief in the book; unfortunately, he is a minor and disposable character here who does manage to create humor through various double-take inducing feats of strength, but nowhere near to the level he should.
Frank Castle himself is unrecognizable. The Punisher from the Marvel world is a battle-tested maniac who borders on insanity and uses lethal force in MacGyverian fashion. Thomas Jane plays him as a brooding rogue cop who clearly possesses too little ingenuity to be dangerous and too much humanity to be menacing. In the film version, Castle uses sleight of hand to subdue a knife-wielding abusive boyfriend when the comic-book Castle would have shoved his face through the back of his skull. The rest of the characters are mere shadows of their comic book selves, and many of them, including Saint and Quentin, don't even exist in the book! In short, the film is an appalling collection of action movie clichés, action movie production values, and action movie coincidences to further the plot that they may as well have not even bothered to adapt an actual source material. The pitch-black humor and perversity found in Ennis' story have been stripped away to create a Frank Castle that won't offend too many mainstream moviegoers by being too brutal, a character trait that, let's face it, is the primary reason people liked The Punisher in the first place.
Not worth the price of admission.