These people must be punished
Jonathan Hensleigh, Michael France, Ari Arad, Anson Downes, Christopher Eberts, Linda Favila, Kevin Feige, Andrew Golov, Andreas Grosch, Patrick Gunn, Gale Anne Hurd, Amir Jacob Malin, Chris Roberts, Richard Saperstein, Andreas Schmid, and John H. Starke
Who are these people you ask? They are the ones responsible for ruining the big screen version of The Punisher. Even without the Dolph Lundgren version of the film as a guide of what not to do, The Punisher would still have to be the hardest comic book property to screw up:
The ultimate badass named Frank Castle, watches his wife and kid get killed and then goes on the rampage against the ultimate cityscape, killing criminal scum in horrible and gory ways and beating the snot out of anyone that pisses him off, including that nancy boy Daredevil while he's at it.
No special powers. No greater sense of duty. Just an ordinary man pushed too far who decides that it is time for criminal scum to be killed. For those reasons, it probably comes as no surprise that The Punisher has always been my favourite comic. And as comic book stories and characters go, it doesn't get much simpler than that.
So how do you fuck something so simple up?
Well first of all you move the setting from New York City to Florida. Oh yes - Warm, tropical sunny weather and palm trees provide a much more dark and foreboding atmosphere than the cold, rainy windswept concrete jungle of New York.
You cast John Travolta as the bad guy. Sorry but he only comes across as goofy. Not scary. Not evil. Just goofy. And that scene where he is smoking a pipe - he would have been perfect if he were supposed to be hamming up a Sherlock Holmes type character instead of playing an evil bad guy.
You kill off his whole family instead of just his wife and kid. I call bullshit on this one. In every family there are at least some members of the family whom everyone else would be glad were dead. I am not saying you would go out and kill them, merely that you would not be overly upset to hear of their deaths.
Blowtorch
torture
bullshit. The real Frank Castle would have actually used the blowtorch on the
guys back to get him to help. None of this steak and icy pole shit.
That whole Thanksgiving dinner scene. Bah! The real Frank Castle would have headbutted them all if they had tried that bullshit on him. In fact he would headbutt them every time he passed them in the hall. I don't care that it was based on the Welcome Back Frank stories - the Punisher I read would never hang around with losers like that.
To be fair the film didn't do everything wrong. Casting Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in any film is always a good thing. The scene where the black guy who helped Frank after he got all shot up says to him "Go with God" to which Frank replies "God is gonna sit this one out". That was a very cool line.
And of course where Frank is about to pull his gun out the draw but decides to take the paper guillotine instead and buries it in the bad guy's head. That is the Punisher I wanted to see.
As a standalone film, it would have been an acceptable revenge story. As a Punisher film, it just doesn't cut it and so it would seem we are destined to never have a decent film version of The Punisher. And someone has to be punished for that.
Everyone agrees that I would make a kickass Punisher
© by Tiberius Alatheus 2004