I hate for my first review to be about this particular movie, but we can't control fate. In a way, it's inversly appropriate. The whole point of this site is to find those gems of creativity, intelligence, beauty, and even occasionally subversion, within the mainstream. Comics, movies, TV, novels, anything. I'm not as much concerned about the medium as I am about the message (take that McLuhan!).
This movie, on the other hand, is the most generic flick I've seen in a while. It's not that it was bad (though it was). It's that it was predictable. It was like someone watched all the McBain clips from The Simpsons and thought, "This could work."
It isn't much of a superhero movie (I never found Punisher to be very heroic, and he's decidedly unsuper), it isn't much of an action movie (why start using a bow and arrows in the middle?), and it isn't much of a cop movie (he's a cop for about three minutes in the whole thing). And can we please stop doing the "hero's symbol in flames across the pavement" gag? It has thus far featured exclusively in movies that sucked (The Crow and Daredevil). Why keep using it?
The producers wanted to make something that would stand next to Death Wish and other 70s, hard-action movies, and that's related to the one thing I respect about it: it a lower budget production than, say, Spider-man or Star War XXL. Which is to say, they didn't try to replace all the people with CGI action figures. It saddens me, though (to get back to the invective), that comicbook-to-movie franchises are now so common place that we've reached the saturation point of making run-of-the-mill crap. Granted, we reached that point with Daredevil last year, but it saddens me none the less.
Don't bother spending money on this movie. It is the most boring form of the revenge tragedy I have ever seen. I mean, he doesn't even die at the end. Have these people watched Renaissance English drama?
Posted by orion at July 8, 2004 12:51 AMYeah... it wasn't well told at all. The poor cinematography, mediocre action, plotholes, bad scripting (and bad acting, which was probably mostly the script's fault) made it a mediocre at best movie. The fact that it destroyed the comic book Punisher's ethos made it a horrible comic book movie. (Come on, his whole angst and dark anger bit was motivated by the fact that he could never have revenge, never name a reason for his family's death other than 'criminals,' otherwise he would've just had one vendetta and it would have been over - oh, wait, like in the movie. Goddamn it.)
You do, however, sound a bit like you don't like the Pun comics. Might I recommend the series dealing with the cult, I believe it's #9 through #12 or so (could be #3 to #6, I don't really remember, it's obvious from the covers). They're about $12 to $3 each, and are marvelous, showing character and base emotion that later issues would abandon in favour of better gunfights and funnier repartee.
Posted by: dan at July 12, 2004 1:17 AMi notice that Ennis is writing the current Punisher series, and i'm tempted to give it a look, just out of curiosity. as you can see from my Preacher review, i'm not entirely sold on Ennis' ideological tendancies, and he seems to parade atrocities in front of the reader just for fun rather than for reasons necessary to the plot. that said, a lot of Preacher was fantastic, so i want to give him a second look.
Posted by: orion at July 14, 2004 4:28 PM