Comic Tales: The Punisher – Extended Cut
When crooked businessman Howard Saint’s son is killed in an FBI sting operation Saint wants the man responsible, undercover FBI agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), dead. He sends his men to kill Castle and his family but, while they manage to kill his wife and son (along with a large proportion of his extended family), they fail to kill Castle himself. Big mistake! Frank comes after Saint looking to dish out a little punishment.
The Punisher isn’t your usual Marvel Comics superhero and Jonathan Hensleigh’s film isn’t your usual comic book movie. This is a throwback to the ‘80s action films, featuring the sort of extreme brutality you don’t see often in action films anymore. It’s surprising that, in an era where a Die Hard movie gets a PG13 rating, the studio had the gumption to go for an R rating rather than tone the film down for the teen market.
Hensleigh didn’t just direct the film, he also co-wrote the script and it’s reasonably faithful to the source material. Its a little uneven, the origin section drags a bit and the likes of Roy Scheider and Samantha Mathis are wasted in underwritten parts, but when it gets going it really hits the spot. The film’s high point is the fight with The Russian, a hitman hired by Saint and a character straight out of the comics. It’s so exuberantly violent that I couldn’t help smiling as the pair crash through walls and pretty much destroy Castle’s apartment. From there on out it’s almost nonstop action as The Punisher takes down Saint and his army of hired guns.
The plodding script that’s littered with duff dialogue early on comes into its own when the action hots up, with Thomas Jane delivering some nice one liners. Jane does a fine job of bringing Marvel’s vigilante to life, fleshing out devoted family man Frank Castle as much as the script will allow but really making an impression as the single-minded, vengeance seeking, Punisher.
In Swordfish John Travolta gave us an over the top comic book villain, so it’s a little surprising that his performance here is so restrained, at least by Travolta villain standards. He never really feels threatening, either physically or intellectually. Castle outwits him, turning him against his own people, before finally settling things; the only question is how many of Saint’s goons he’ll have to kill before facing him man to man (the answer is quite a lot).
Hensleigh clearly sees the film as a modern western and sticks in a couple of gunfights that pay homage to Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti westerns. In fact the film is peppered throughout with sly nods to other films and TV, from the reference to Castle having worked for CTU to the El Mariachi inspired hitman who serenades him in the dinner. Rather than intrusive it just adds to the enjoyment, particularly on repeat viewings.
This extended cut adds a subplot about the man who betrayed Castle, an FBI colleague and ex-army buddy, who gives up Frank’s name to Saint. The storyline doesn’t add greatly to the film as a whole but it does reach a suitably satisfying conclusion. There’s also a pre-credits Kuwait sequence that was never filmed and is instead shown in a rough animation style that uses the original storyboards as a guide and features Thomas Jane’s voice. It adds a little more background to the characters but it’s easy to see why it was never filmed, it would have been a costly sequence to film and the movie works perfectly well without it.
This version may not be perfect but it’s a big leap forward from the previous cinematic incarnation of the character that featured Dolph Lundgren in the title role. Hensleigh’s film is a big dumb action movie, the kind they don’t make anymore, choc full of gratuitous violence. It did well enough at the box office to warrant a sequel which should reach screens latter this year. Sadly this films two biggest plus points - Jonathan Hensleigh, who showed that he had a real gift for action, and Thomas Jane who made the part his own - will be absent from the follow up.
