I Can't Believe I Rented It - The Punisher

I Can’t Believe I Rented It – The Punisher

Lethal Weapon. Desperado. The Terminator. What do these three movies have in common? They all did “The Punisher” better than “The Punisher” did.

How hard is it to make a movie called “The Punisher?” All he has to do for about an hour and a half is run around and shoot people. It should be a gun lover’s dream. If you like murderous psychopaths running around a metropolitan area with powerful firearms, then you should like “The Punisher.” But director Jonathan Hensleigh thought that instead of a kill-spree, we would prefer a half-assed soap opera between the bad guys and his version of “The Real World: Liberty City,” featuring Fat Neck and The Kid With Too Many Piercings. Watch the hilarity ensue when their homicidal neighbor almost kills a guy right in front of them.

The movie didn’t start off that bad, because almost everything I would have changed was nit-picking, but things took a turn for the stupid when the Punisher, a trained military killing machine, gave up his tactical advantage of being dead by confronting his cop friends in broad daylight, in front of the courthouse, while they were surrounded by hundreds of reporters. As soon as he did that, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “I see why people didn’t like this movie.”

Things were pretty tolerable until he did that, and it was then that I began to wonder, “Didn’t he watch Lethal Weapon?” I stayed in that mode for the rest of the movie, because Martin Riggs was a better Punisher than Frank Castle. This Punisher had buddies and was almost like the wacky fix-it man down the hall. There was no secret about who he was and it didn’t seem to bother anyone that he was a trained killer who was out for revenge. This was Happy Sunshine Punisher, with a lovely day-glo playset because almost everything he did took place during the day. On a positive note, he was completely wasted for most of it.

I started pondering about what a person would really like to see in a Punisher movie. I’d imagine that there would be some creative gunfights, some torture, and I don’t know, an execution of revenge. If someone knocked off my whole family, I’d probably try to get some getback, too. I just hope the narrator to my life wouldn’t think that anything less than bloody massacres and full-scale warfare would be the right way to go.

Eventually, this movie gets to the part where The Punisher screws his balls back on and gets to killing folk, but before you get there, you have to wade through some half-ass friendship with some people whose names I can’t be bothered to remember and some chick who wants to get down, but he can’t because he’s, you know…grieving. This broad is so selfish that she’s trying to get in his pants even though he just watched 40 members of his family die violent deaths just five months ago, and he’s busy trying to drink his way into Heaven to be with them. Personally, I’m glad he turned down the poon, because I’m so tired of people forcing love interests into comic book movies. He’s a one-man revenge squad, but he’s got time to blow this chick’s back out?

I swear, if he had kissed her, I would have turned the movie off right then and there.

Luckily, he didn’t, because I would have missed Big Daddy Cool Diesel coming on screen and beating the crap out of Thomas Jane. The movie had long since lost my attention by this point, because the soap opera had started with Frank tricking the main bad guy into thinking that his best friend was sleeping with his wife, and the bad guys know that Frank is alive, but can’t find him, but suddenly they do, and start sending assassins from around the world to Frank’s house. See, it’s stupid because Frank is supposed to be the assassin shooting up the bad guy’s house. I know he spends most of the movie drunk, but what the fuck’s he waiting on, for the bad guy to get his costume out of the cleaners? He’s supposed to be getting revenge, but he’s at the fucking lunch counter eating soup, watching the assassin come in and sing him a song?

I’m not making that part up. An assassin comes in, pulls out a guitar and serenades The Punisher. He doesn’t even shoot the guy. This sort of thing never happens to El Mariachi.

The movie just kind of goes on like that. It tries to add things like romance and humor and bullshit to a movie and a character that’s naturally dark and violent. The Punisher is not a deep character. It’s a wonder that a character this simple has lasted so long, but he has. And since he has, when a movie is made about him, it should just involve those simple aspects: Guns and killing stuff with those guns. At night. I guess all of it was an effort to try to make the Punisher interesting, but no one wants the Punisher to be interesting. People want the Punisher to kill people.

Obviously, the right people aren’t getting reamed for these movies, because Jonathan Hensleigh should have never been allowed to make this one. Did producer Avi Arad actually have his eyes open when he read the script? Because at some point during the creative process, someone should have read that script and said, “Wait, what? How does a fake love triangle with the bad guy, his wife, and the gay best friend keep people from not walking out on our movie?” From start to finish, there should have been people dying, starting with the Punisher’s family and ending with the person responsible. Having said all of that, I’d like to go ahead and fill out an application for director of the next comic book movie. At least I know my movie wouldn’t piss me off.

Look, no one looks to the Punisher for emotional depth or because they can relate, they’re reading him because this guy is fucked up and he’s going see to it that he isn’t fucked up alone. The movie should be along those same lines. This isn’t Spider-Man. Frank should have been out stapling men’s nuts to their foreheads, not having an awkward Thanksgiving dinner with the rejects that live in his building.