I love Punisher '89. Way better than '04, IMHO. Haven't seen War Zone, so I can't compare.
You can find some of the deleted scenes on Youtube. There is a good bit of back story there.
Lady Tanaka was definitely the best villain out of the three movies.
The Trojan horse-like ambush at the cafe alone should allow Tanaka to trump Quentin. You know the part where she had already poisoned Franco's men and they didn't know it? Then shoves a Magnum down one of their throats and pulls the trigger. Fu##in' awesome sequence.Naw, I'd say Quentin Glass was the best villain, but Tanaka does come a close ****ing second.
Lundgren looks really creepy in this movie IMO and it's very effective! He almost looks undead (fits perfectly)! Ever notice the way the (painted-on looking) five-o-clock shadow shaping his jaw line, dark circles around his eyes, and jet black (dyed) hair contrasting against his pale skin make his face look skull-like? Even if this wasn't the original intent of the filmmakers, they must have realized it at some point and ran with it.This movie gets more hate than it deserves. As an action movie...it works. It was directed by Mark Goldblatt whose one of the top 5 best editors of the action genre and James Cameron's right-hand man. The dude understands the genre and delivered the goods. Is it a great movie? No, but neither were the other two Punisher movies.
Also, I kinda like Dolph Lundgren's Punisher the best. His interpretation was to play the character as a crazy person. He'll kill anybody. Tom Jane and Ray Stevenson showed a little more humanity with their performance. Lundgren, however, was on an emotion-less killing spree. Plus, the dude lives in the sewers, like a Ninja Turtle, and sits around naked talking to God! What the. . .?
By the way, I find it funny that Stan Lee got hired as a consultant even though he didn't even create the character. lol.
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The Punisher doesn't work on film simply because The Punisher is a one dimentional character, his family was killed and now he's a killing machine...that's all there is to the punisher.
The character hasn't worked on film because he's too complex for 90 minutes to accurately depict him. An HBO series is the only way to get it right.
I actually think the '89 flick is the best attempt at the Punisher on film. If they had just put the damn skull on his shirt...
The Punisher is kind of a cursed film property, everyone that touches it get sent to director's jail. Goldblatt went back to editing after it. It took Hensleigh till 2011 to make another movie, though he make Welcome to the Jungle, which was a no budget direct-to-DVD movie in '05. And no one has heard from Alexander since PWZ came out.