I’m not usually one to quibble with critics. I don’t always agree, but usually I understand where they’re coming from.
*Speed Racer *was an exception, where the reviews I read made it sound as though they just hadn’t relaxed and enjoyed the movie, and were too busy analyzing it.
The Punisher is another. To me, it’s kind of like what Sin City ought to have been. Now, dont’ get me wrong, Sin City was good. But it was so absurdly stylized and so broken up into little stories (nderstandable, given the original material) that I felt it was just too much of a movie. Watching Sin City felt like trying to swallow a whole ham. It was tasty and meaty, but maybe was just too damn meaty.
The Punisher is alike having a nice time to eat the whole Thanksgiving dinner. It’s violent, and gruesomely so. People are massacred about every 30 seconds in ways which defy belief and the laws of physics. Yet, if it’s guilty, it’s a guilty pleasure, far better acted than it deserves.
It helps that, unlike the Thomas Jane movie a few years ago, the villain here is Dominic West, in an absolutely awesome role as the cruel killer Jigsaw. His brother, Loony Bin Jim is manically, well, loony, but actually pretty damn scary for it. The pair has a recruitment drive which is too zany to be believed, but really works given the madness this movie goes through.
Ray Stevenson brings a bitter emptiness to the role of Castle. He’s a little old to play the action parts too strongly *(unlike Loony Bin Jim’s Doung Hutchison), but manages a controlled brutality very well. Stevenson’s Frank Castle seems to be affected by flashbacks one occasion, perhaps a nod to the Iraq War (there’s one other mention of it, but the movie is not political in that sense).
What’s more interesting is that the movie deals very early with the consequences of Castle’s one-man crusade against crime. And given how bad things are now in the movie (and the ridiculous number of murders attributed to him), I can’t say I entirely blame him. This is a crapsack world at best, where crooks have the cops over a barrel and things are bad and maybe still getting worse.
The movie doesn’t present any easy answers, however. Castle does his thing, and people feel like the they have to go along with it because there’s no better option. And Castle himself seems to recognize that and wants to get off his one-way ticket to Hell, but he can’t quit without leaving others to suffer. There’s no ultimate answer here, but we do see that perhaps Frank changed a little by the end.
