I said it before, I'll say it again...
The Punisher: Skull F*&$ed
By Gridlock’d
* out of four
Considering how unbelievably low my expectations were by the time I saw it, it's virtually impossible that I could be disappointed in this movie. But I was. In fact, I hated it.
When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the opening
credits and I liked the Thomas Jane as an undercover cop in a bust-gone-bad. Considering the ridiculous amount of *****ing I did about this change in the character, I was starting to feel a little stupid, even wondering how I would word my apology thread. But this didn't last long and the whole movie nosedives quickly. I realized that making the Punisher a cop wasn't the problem, making him completely ******ed, well, that was an interesting move, to say the least. A bold decision, I felt.
Case in point: Any cunning warrior knows that one of your greatest assets in the element of surprise. Frank Castle is rightly presumed dead after being shot in the chest at close range and blown up. I’m sure in Howard Saints’ wildest imagination he wouldn’t figure Frank would be resurrected by a voodoo guy. (Yes, a voodoo guy. And you thought the original origin was contrived?!) I mean, who could have seen that coming? So the world thinks Frank Castle is dead, until he shows up at a PRESS CONFERENCE!! So the world then says, ‘Huh, Frank Castle isn’t dead. How ‘bout that. He must have been vacationing near a voodoo guy.’ There is no strategic value whatsoever in announcing to the world, even making a special announcement to Saint just in case he wasn’t watching TV, that he’s alive. It’s like saying; ‘Okay bad guy, if your defenses are down, get them up because that’ll make my job a lot harder.’
I started to worry about the movie at this precise moment: His son gives his Dad the infamous skull tee-shirt as a gift. This should be an important moment in the script.
“Do you like it, Dad?”
Tom Jane regards it. In the beat that ensued, my mind tried to finish the sentence.
TOM: Like it…?
“I’m sure I’ll learn to like it./ It’s not really my style, son/ I can’t see wearing something like this./I hope you kept the receipt.” Something ironic or haunting since the audience knows this will become his signature style.
TOM: …I love it!
Sigh.
So Howard Saint kills the Punishers’ Wife, Son, Mother, Father, Aunts, Uncles, Nieces and Nephews. So what does the Punisher to in retaliation? He decides to make Saint suspicious that his wife may be cheating on him!
Aw, Hell, yeah, boy!!!! Make that muth****a question his marriage! That's what you get for messing with The Punisher!
I mean, WHAT THE @#$#?! This is what you came up with?! Seriously, this is his plan: He finds out where the wife will be (Because as much as Saint loves his wife, he lets her travel alone. Pay no mind to the resurrected madman who was nice enough to specifically warn you about his revenge against the Saint family) and when she leaves her car, he steals it and parks it in front of a hotel.
Then he reaches into a big black back and pulls out a FIRE HYDRANT! He puts it on the sidewalk in front of the car so she’ll get a ticket for being parked in front of a hydrant. All this in the hopes that Saint will find the parking ticket and think his wife is at a hotel with Saints' best friend.
This begs many a question:
Is it easier to obtain a phony fire hydrant than to make a phony parking ticket?
Are there no real fire hydrants you could park in front of?
Couldn't you just, you know, shoot the wife? Wouldn't that settle the score? Because that’s apparently his goal in the first place, he
takes credit for it at the end: "I made you kill your wife." he says. Not really, dude. You made him suspect his wife was cheating and he's such a lunatic that he killed her.
"I made you kill your best friend." Well again, it helped that Saint is an easily manipulated psycho anyway. But if you wanted these people dead, why didn’t you do it? Look at you’re shirt! You’re the Punisher! Isn’t that your job? He was more like ‘The Manipulator’. He should have worn a shirt with a fire hydrant on it.
And let's talk about Saints "best friend".
In order for the Punisher to make it seem like there's an affair going on, he gets Saints' best friend to show up at the same hotel that his wife was parked in front of. How? By threatening to expose his big, dark, ugly secret, that he is (get ready to gasp)... a gay man!
Can you imagine? A gay man in Florida? In this day and age? Travolta calls this guy his best friend, even his brother, and he doesn't know he's gay? These are middle-aged men, how long have they been best friends? 10-20 years? You mean this never came up in conversation? Even the wife knows! Worse, I guess he thinks Travolta will kill him if he finds out.
Would you be best friends with a guy like that?
At this point the movie decides to go for intentional laughs. The Punisher moves into a building with three, I can only describe them as wacky, neighbors.
I wanted to like the neighbors. There is actually a brilliant black comedy, buried somewhere in the Punisher. But the neighbors were introduced so clumsily and for the most part, they all seem so forced. For instance, I've lived in apartment buildings; I've never gotten to know my neighbors. These three hang out together all the time. They even eat at the same diner together. They seem to see themselves as some kind of cosmic soul mates brought together by this building. Because, despite the fact he barely knows him, Spacker Dave allows himself to be tortured by bad guys (with the fat neighbor looking on the entire time but too fat and cowardly to do anything) so as not to give up the Punisher. When the Punisher rightly asks why, it's "because you're one of us." One of us what? One of the tenants in this building?
Then there's the big, stupid finale.
It's like since the movie was a series of little stupid things, it needed a really big stupid thing at the end. So here it is: The Punisher is in a giant parking lot and after he finally gets his revenge on Saint. He reveals that his wife and best friend were never cheating on him. Saint has to live with the grief and guilt of what he's done. For about two minutes. And then Punisher just kills him. Lot of trouble to go to for two minutes, Frank. But there's more.
The Punisher detonates a series of bombs in the parking lot. From an aerial view we see the exploded car fires form the shape of the Punisher skull.
I'll give you a moment to wrap your brain around that.
Really, think about it. It's so large scale, how could Frank even tell from the ground how this was going to make a skull shape? He would have needed an overhead map of the area or something. This really would have taken a lot of planning and preparation. And why would he bother because WHO IS EVEN SEEING THE %&*$ING SKULL SHAPE?!! The people on the MOON?! Is there a helicopter tour? Seriously, why would you BOTHER?!! For WHO?!! WHY??!! AAAARRRGGHH!!!!
Bottom line. After Frank is brought back to life by the friendly neighborhood voodoo man he’s told to “Go with God.” To which Big Pun replies; “I think God is gonna sit this one out.” I advise you all to do the same.
The Punisher: Skull F*&$ed
By Gridlock’d
* out of four
Considering how unbelievably low my expectations were by the time I saw it, it's virtually impossible that I could be disappointed in this movie. But I was. In fact, I hated it.
When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the opening
credits and I liked the Thomas Jane as an undercover cop in a bust-gone-bad. Considering the ridiculous amount of *****ing I did about this change in the character, I was starting to feel a little stupid, even wondering how I would word my apology thread. But this didn't last long and the whole movie nosedives quickly. I realized that making the Punisher a cop wasn't the problem, making him completely ******ed, well, that was an interesting move, to say the least. A bold decision, I felt.
Case in point: Any cunning warrior knows that one of your greatest assets in the element of surprise. Frank Castle is rightly presumed dead after being shot in the chest at close range and blown up. I’m sure in Howard Saints’ wildest imagination he wouldn’t figure Frank would be resurrected by a voodoo guy. (Yes, a voodoo guy. And you thought the original origin was contrived?!) I mean, who could have seen that coming? So the world thinks Frank Castle is dead, until he shows up at a PRESS CONFERENCE!! So the world then says, ‘Huh, Frank Castle isn’t dead. How ‘bout that. He must have been vacationing near a voodoo guy.’ There is no strategic value whatsoever in announcing to the world, even making a special announcement to Saint just in case he wasn’t watching TV, that he’s alive. It’s like saying; ‘Okay bad guy, if your defenses are down, get them up because that’ll make my job a lot harder.’
I started to worry about the movie at this precise moment: His son gives his Dad the infamous skull tee-shirt as a gift. This should be an important moment in the script.
“Do you like it, Dad?”
Tom Jane regards it. In the beat that ensued, my mind tried to finish the sentence.
TOM: Like it…?
“I’m sure I’ll learn to like it./ It’s not really my style, son/ I can’t see wearing something like this./I hope you kept the receipt.” Something ironic or haunting since the audience knows this will become his signature style.
TOM: …I love it!
Sigh.
So Howard Saint kills the Punishers’ Wife, Son, Mother, Father, Aunts, Uncles, Nieces and Nephews. So what does the Punisher to in retaliation? He decides to make Saint suspicious that his wife may be cheating on him!
Aw, Hell, yeah, boy!!!! Make that muth****a question his marriage! That's what you get for messing with The Punisher!
I mean, WHAT THE @#$#?! This is what you came up with?! Seriously, this is his plan: He finds out where the wife will be (Because as much as Saint loves his wife, he lets her travel alone. Pay no mind to the resurrected madman who was nice enough to specifically warn you about his revenge against the Saint family) and when she leaves her car, he steals it and parks it in front of a hotel.
Then he reaches into a big black back and pulls out a FIRE HYDRANT! He puts it on the sidewalk in front of the car so she’ll get a ticket for being parked in front of a hydrant. All this in the hopes that Saint will find the parking ticket and think his wife is at a hotel with Saints' best friend.
This begs many a question:
Is it easier to obtain a phony fire hydrant than to make a phony parking ticket?
Are there no real fire hydrants you could park in front of?
Couldn't you just, you know, shoot the wife? Wouldn't that settle the score? Because that’s apparently his goal in the first place, he
takes credit for it at the end: "I made you kill your wife." he says. Not really, dude. You made him suspect his wife was cheating and he's such a lunatic that he killed her.
"I made you kill your best friend." Well again, it helped that Saint is an easily manipulated psycho anyway. But if you wanted these people dead, why didn’t you do it? Look at you’re shirt! You’re the Punisher! Isn’t that your job? He was more like ‘The Manipulator’. He should have worn a shirt with a fire hydrant on it.
And let's talk about Saints "best friend".
In order for the Punisher to make it seem like there's an affair going on, he gets Saints' best friend to show up at the same hotel that his wife was parked in front of. How? By threatening to expose his big, dark, ugly secret, that he is (get ready to gasp)... a gay man!
Can you imagine? A gay man in Florida? In this day and age? Travolta calls this guy his best friend, even his brother, and he doesn't know he's gay? These are middle-aged men, how long have they been best friends? 10-20 years? You mean this never came up in conversation? Even the wife knows! Worse, I guess he thinks Travolta will kill him if he finds out.
Would you be best friends with a guy like that?
At this point the movie decides to go for intentional laughs. The Punisher moves into a building with three, I can only describe them as wacky, neighbors.
I wanted to like the neighbors. There is actually a brilliant black comedy, buried somewhere in the Punisher. But the neighbors were introduced so clumsily and for the most part, they all seem so forced. For instance, I've lived in apartment buildings; I've never gotten to know my neighbors. These three hang out together all the time. They even eat at the same diner together. They seem to see themselves as some kind of cosmic soul mates brought together by this building. Because, despite the fact he barely knows him, Spacker Dave allows himself to be tortured by bad guys (with the fat neighbor looking on the entire time but too fat and cowardly to do anything) so as not to give up the Punisher. When the Punisher rightly asks why, it's "because you're one of us." One of us what? One of the tenants in this building?
Then there's the big, stupid finale.
It's like since the movie was a series of little stupid things, it needed a really big stupid thing at the end. So here it is: The Punisher is in a giant parking lot and after he finally gets his revenge on Saint. He reveals that his wife and best friend were never cheating on him. Saint has to live with the grief and guilt of what he's done. For about two minutes. And then Punisher just kills him. Lot of trouble to go to for two minutes, Frank. But there's more.
The Punisher detonates a series of bombs in the parking lot. From an aerial view we see the exploded car fires form the shape of the Punisher skull.
I'll give you a moment to wrap your brain around that.
Really, think about it. It's so large scale, how could Frank even tell from the ground how this was going to make a skull shape? He would have needed an overhead map of the area or something. This really would have taken a lot of planning and preparation. And why would he bother because WHO IS EVEN SEEING THE %&*$ING SKULL SHAPE?!! The people on the MOON?! Is there a helicopter tour? Seriously, why would you BOTHER?!! For WHO?!! WHY??!! AAAARRRGGHH!!!!
Bottom line. After Frank is brought back to life by the friendly neighborhood voodoo man he’s told to “Go with God.” To which Big Pun replies; “I think God is gonna sit this one out.” I advise you all to do the same.
