It saw the violence in the MAX books and just went "YEA! VIOLENCE!" without acknowledging the story.
I'm a fellow fan of the Tom Jane film, oddly I haven't gotten a chance to see Warzone, but I do see lots of negative things about it. When making a Punisher film, the first question shouldn't be "How much violence does this need?" but rather, what story and subject manner am I going to tell and how am I going to weave Frank into it? That is my main worry everytime a new Punisher project is announced.
For me, I've seen a lot of 80s action and Revenge Flicks, but I always came back to Frank because it went beyond being personal; he doesn't just hang up the skull after avenging his family, he just never stops, he knows he'll never win, but he wants to make as much difference as possible. I see Frank as a cold and "dead man"; emotions, mercy, pity, they're all gone, replaced by a mechanical analysis. What I feel needs to be done to avoid him being 1 dimensional is to still have him reflect through narration and comparison. I always loved how personal he took violence and abuse of women; I could almost see him imagining his daughter or his wife in a situation like that and thus going on the war path. He may be "dead" but he's still conscious; he has thoughts and opinions; I remember when he was killing a few Russian thugs he noted one of them started to cry and say the Lord's Prayer. Frank said:
"The Lord's Prayer...I'd recognize it in any language.."
He gave him a second to finish it before killing him; I found it interesting because Frank, formerly being a significantly religious individual, took a moment to reflect on that moment and was not slaughtering everything like a programmed automaton; what would have made things bland for me is if he did not think about that, but rather just silently exterminated the thugs and then have the panel change. He may not have felt mercy, or pity, but rather it was a moment that got his attention, he found it interesting and then finished him. If that scene was in a movie I could see a bit of an expansion being given to his thought patterns; afterwards he could have a minor day dream as to what things would be like if he did fully go into the priesthood. He may see himself in that alternate life listening to someone's confessional. Either way, my point is, have him like an inquisitive machine/ Terminator interacting with things foreign to him; he understands pain, evil, good, begging for mercy, what have you, but it still should feel somewhat foreign to him and something that drifts past him; like the T1000's manner of studying people, stopping to take a closer look at their pain or resilience, filing it in his memory and soldier on, not gaining sympathy. To make Frank interesting is to have him reflect on what he's doing and the little bits of humanity he sees around him. Either way, he should be brutal, but not souless and bland.
Eep, sorry for the massive ramble.
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