We’ve been playing the what-was-the-first-Marvel-Comics-movie? trivia game at work recently, partly because I recently watched Ghost Rider and was moved to do a bit of research on the topic (due to the strange order in which Marvel’s characters made it to the screen). Nobody got it right, but one person did suggest it was Blade, which was a very good guess. Now I’ve been saying Blade was actually #2, which is slightly baffling as part of me is obviously aware that Dolph Lundgren did a Punisher movie in 1988, which I even vaguely remember watching many years ago. However it turns out that the Lundgren Punisher went DTV in the States, and thus no more qualifies than Bride of the Incredible Hulk or Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge.
For an actual movie version of The Punisher you have to set the dial on your time-trousers to 2004 and Jonathan Hensleigh’s adaptation of the character (technically #9 on the Marvel movie list). The deal around this time, I understand, is that while Marvel Studios were still setting themselves up, an entity called Marvel Enterprises would license out second-string characters to appear in low-budget films (which may explain a whole slew of these mid-2000s films). This is one of those, and one of the first films to feature a version of the Marvel marque in front of the credits.
The film opens with the FBI busting an arms deal in progress in Tampa, Florida (the film was largely made in this unexpected location simply because the city offered the production some big incentives at no charge) – everyone gets collared except for one guy brokering the deal and a young kid who seems mainly to be there for thrills; they are both gunned down. However, the dead broker hops back onto his feet once all the crooks have been taken away; it turns out he is ace soldier turned ace undercover FBI agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), and this is his last field assignment before he relocates to the much safer environment of London for a desk job (clearly the FBI haven’t seen those Tory scare videos about what a hellhole the UK capital has become).
Unfortunately, the dead kid turns out to be the youngest son of well-fed crime lord Howard Saint (John Travolta in one of his last roles before largely dropping off the radar, or so it seems to me, anyway). Saint is not the type of gangster to respond with due reflection when one of his kids gets offed, and (quite easily, for the plot demands it) finds out where our future Punisher is enjoying a long-overdue family reunion in the Caribbean. He’s there with Pa Punisher (Roy Scheider), Mrs Punisher (Samantha Mathis), Punisher Jr (can’t be bothered to look it up, sorry), and the rest of the clan. ‘Kill them all,’ orders Mrs Saint (Laura Elena Gräfin von Bismarck-Schönhausen), who’s been allowed to attend the mob revenge planning meeting, probably (I suspect) because she is going to get murdered in the course of the plot and this way it looks like she deserves it.
Well, anyway, the mob killers turn up and the entire Castle family is duly fridged, except for Frank Punisher of course: he gets shot in both legs and the torso (by the twin brother of Saint’s dead boy; thrifty casting) and then blasted off a burning pier into the sea, but soon enough he is swearing to avenge his loved ones while wearing a t-shirt his son bought for him which should be very merchandisable (provided, y’know, it doesn’t get appropriated by real-life extremists, forcing him to rebrand himself). Back he moves to Florida where soon enough his masterplan is in motion.
So: you may have heard one of those stories where writers complain about characters developing a life of their own and not doing what their creators expected. Something similar seems to have happened to the Punisher, who started his comic book career as a villain fighting Spider-Man – he was an assassin who only took contracts against criminals. He proved unexpectedly popular, but after a few appearances the creators felt the character had nowhere left to go, so they wrote him out – rather tellingly, rather than being killed off, the Punisher went mad and started attacking people for dropping litter and committing traffic offences, this being felt to be the logical path for the character to take (this was later retconned, of course).
You can sense the writers’ unease with the popularity of someone who is a closer-to-reality vigilante than most of Marvel’s masked crimefighters – the average actual person is very unlikely to develop special powers from cosmic radiation or insect bites, but – in the States, at least – it’s relatively easy to get your hands on a gun and start looking for crooks to blow away. People writing Punisher stories since have tended to fall into one of two camps – the first suggesting that being a gun-toting vigilante, if done responsibly and mindfully (and if this itself isn’t an actual oxymoron), can help with significant social problems and make the world a better place. The second camp prefer the view that, rather than being a solution to the world’s problems, the existence of someone like Frank Castle is just a symptom of how bad things have got, and the resulting stories are generally darker and more ambiguous.
I generally find Punisher stories from camp one to be quite boring when they’re not actually disturbingly irresponsible in their politics; what got me started reading about the character was Garth Ennis’ take on him – this version of Castle is basically a monster, barely kept in check by his own moral code, for whom the loss of his loved ones is not much more than a pretext that allows him some vague justification to keep killing, which is the thing he truly loves. The stories, as so often with Ennis, mix grotesque black comedy with serious moral reflection. In theory The Punisher is partly based on Ennis’ first Punisher mini-series, Welcome Back Frank – but the vast majority of the story has been ditched in favour of a very routine revenge melodrama straight out of camp one.
It doesn’t even stick that close to the character’s origins in the comics – the FBI angle is new, as is the notion of Castle’s family being specifically targeted. I suppose there are valid reasons for the changes in terms of this being a movie script, but it does seem like a deliberate attempt to make the most boring Punisher adaptation imaginable. Castle spends forever on a Machiavellian scheme to trick Saint into killing his own wife and best friend, just so he’ll feel extra bad at the moment when Castle pops up and executes him. Meanwhile, it seems that everyone in Florida knows the Punisher’s address, as a string of assassins and goons keeps turning up on his doorstep to be dealt with.
It is really poor, in short; the best sequence is the one that comes closest to Welcome Back Frank, throughout one issue of which Castle is beaten up at great length by an enormous killer known as the Russian, at one point being smashed through a wall with his own toilet bowl. It’s outrageous and blackly comic in a way that feels totally alien to the rest of the film – Hensleigh’s intentions seem much more in line with a preposterous sequence in which Castle declares, via voice-over, that he’s not motivated by a desire for revenge (sh’yeah, right) and that he’s killing all these people in the hope of shaming the legal system into doing more to protect the innocent. It’s the sort of fig-leaf manifesto you’d expect from some kind of right-wing extremist, which is arguably what this version of the Punisher really is.
Virtually the film’s only saving grace is Thomas Jane, who does his best to provide some of the nuance lacking in the script; he has charisma, looks the part, and can deliver a one-liner appropriately when issued with it (Saint: ‘You killed my son!’ (faint explosion off-camera) Punisher: ‘Both your sons.’). The Punisher has been played by more actors than most Marvel characters and Jane is by no means the worst of them. But, outside the context of the wider Marvel universe, most of what makes the Punisher distinctive and interesting has been lost – that’s even assuming the makers of the film were ever that interested in any version of the comics character.
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