I liked it (contractually obligated sex scenes notwithstanding). I’d put it on the top tier with Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and above the bottom tier of Daredevil and Iron Fist. I’ve never read any Punisher comics, so I can’t comment on whether it’s faithful to the original or not.
I thought Jon Bernthal’s acting was top notch. Same with they guy who played Micro. In fact, everyone did a pretty good job except for my least favourite: Karen Page. I wish they could just dump that character.
I’ve finished it out and I really liked it. That final fight between Frank and Russo is epic, and disturbing.
In fact, The way Frank brutally smashes Russo’s face into that mirror, and then GRINDS the side of his face down the broken glass was so hard to watch but at the same time I was like “Jesus Christ! Hell Yeah!”
When the scene with the thug murders happened, I was actually kind of shocked despite knowing what kind of character The Punisher is. Somehow I expected the typical softening of how brutal a real fight that intense would be. But Castle straight up murders four guys like a guy in a slasher film. Nothing in the rest of the series is quite that murdery. Hell, none of the fights live up to the jail brawl from Daredevil Season 2.
I did not go back and review Daredevil Season 2, but I thought the murder of Castle’s family had been solved and avenged. Somehow they had to make it all unsolved and unavenged all of the sudden. It continued to baffle me throughout the series. But squeezing time to binge watch a show is tricky for me. Re-binging is a challenge I can’t quite rise to.
Seems like I was bugged for a while that the show was not yet admitting to the audience that Russo was evil. Then I was annoyed about them dragging out the reveal to the good guys. Then when the reveal happened, the scene didn’t make sense. Why would Castle suddenly realize he’d been betrayed because Russo appeared just then, and why did Russo feel he might as well confess?
Usually in these series, somebody else spots the easter egg introduction of some side character from the Marvel universe. So, okay, did I miss a hint that ugly Russo goes on to be a known recurring enemy?
These are just complaints and questions. I liked the show. Since ranking the series seems to be the mode, I put Jessica Jones on top, then the Daredevils, Luke Cage, Punisher, Iron Fist and Defenders. Authorities being willing to look the other way made a lot more sense at the end of Punisher than it did in Defenders.
Mandani is a great character. I worried that for a woman to turn out to have been fucking a bad guy compromises her hard won credibility worse than it does for a man. I appreciate the fact that they didn’t go on to humiliate her much over it, but I had already spent several episodes not knowing that this was not the kind of show the writers wanted it to be, so in effect until I rewatch the show knowing that, my experience in watching is that the sex life she has every right to enjoy was used to humiliate her.
I forgot to mention: I thought the denouement (where the government guys let him go) was dumb. I thought it would have been more satisfying if he escaped again.
Still, much more believable than at the end of Defenders where people who would obviously have been filmed leaving a building the world saw get bombed are being left out of the official narrative. On the other hand, the CIA lady just got relieved of the harrowing need to cover up for a rogue element in the CIA that not only compromised her, but was murdering Homeland Security agents and putting the status of the whole agency in jeopardy. I completely believe she was feeling real fucking generous. Having his biometrics swapped out and then just letting him continue to be a fugitive doesn’t seem that implausible on a character level. If she can just resist the urge to make it look like there was a third whole goddamned conspiracy to kill Frank’s family, just to get some people out of the way, she’s golden.
In the comics, Frank Castle’s greatest enemy is called Billy Russo, alias Jigsaw
This is a continuation. The Castle family was killed in the shootout at the park, and Frank found and killed the groups responsible during Daredevil, including his old CO. What’s revealed in this one is that the drug meeting that instigated the shootout was set there specifically to target him and his family, by Rawlins.
Four episodes in, and the actor playing Micro is driving me nuts because he seems so damned familiar. Yet I looked him up on IMDB, and literally the only thing I’ve previously seen him in was a single episode of Fringe. Either he stood out enough in that one episode to cement his face in my memory, or he just resembles somebody I’ve met IRL.
Also, whoever is ultimately in charge of these Netflix shows - all of the Marvel series as well as a number of other “Netflix Original” shows I’ve watched - is really in love with their title sequences. Good grief, do they really need to be that long and elaborate?
Concidering that was Amber Rose Revah, I thought that was a rather sound medical decision.
It’s okay, but let’s face it: nothing will ever live up to the Dolph Lundgren movie.
Probably his resemblance to Adam Driver…
I recognized the ‘Micro’ actor as the mad scientist from the series “The Last Ship.”
It wasn’t the implausibility that made me think it was dumb (although the Homeland Security people seemed relatively blase about a guy who was previously convicted on 37 counts of murder). It’s just that it didn’t seem like there was much point to having that scene at all. His face is still famous and he’ll still have to hide out under a fake name to avoid nosy reporters or the friends or relatives of all the people he killed, so why bother with it?
Aha, but notice that he went totally unrecognized with nothing more than a beard. And even that turned out to be unnecessary, because he was exactly as safe later when he shaved his beard. All he has to do is not wear the skull armor. If somebody accidentally holds up an image of a skull next to his face, well then I’ll admit he’ll be immediately compromised.
Yes, all he has to do to go unnoticed is have everyone think he’s dead (I’m not sure how that would work a second time) plus (a) change his appearance and name, or (b) live in an abandoned power plant. So how does changing his biometrics in a police file fix anything?
He won’t be identified just by leaving behind blood and/or fingerprints. Then when he gets caught again there might not even be a huge stink about how all those records got changed because, you know, haxx0rz. So, you can see why they’d bother. A bit of subterfuge that might work once and might not create an epic shitstorm when it fails to make the tiny bit of difference it could possibly make is totally reasonable spycraft.
Huh. That does seem unlikely. Okay, maybe they’re planning to kill Castle after they’ve convinced Madani that they’ve given a break to the guy who cracked her case and saved her life. But surely Castle will guess that he’ll be betrayed just as he’s supposedly being released into the wild. And wouldn’t be surprised to find Madani seeing through the flaws in this plan herself. So, this improbable deception really doesn’t buy them anything from either Castle or Madani.
But since obviously a room full of writers must have thought about this longer than the ten minutes I’ve spent on the problem just now, there must be a way out of this apparent absurdity that I’m just not clever enough to see.
Yeah, now I remember him. He had the most satisfactory villain ending that I’ve seen yet. I mean , other than that chinese dude that Wolf took down.
I thought it was excellent overall. Much better than I had anticipated, since the character (who I only knew through his appearance in Daredevil) seemed so one note. Things I liked:
-Almost all the acting
-Portrayal of, and discussion of, veterans
-Relationship between Frank and Micro
-Relationship between Frank and Micro’s family, some or all of which took place with Frank knowing he was on camera
Stuff I didn’t like:
-The plan to ambush the baddies by setting up a fake weapons buy once the bug was discovered was clever, but… the bad guys are expecting to be trying to capture Frank Castle. Who has repeatedly killed 5+ guys at once. So they should have been there with, I dunno, a tank. And the DHS was there expecting to capture a team that was expecting to capture Frank Castle. So they show up with… 4 or 5 guys with no body armor, and sufficiently bad perimeter security that Stein ends up all alone, and gets killed for it (plus he was stupid to get that close, but that’s neither here nor there)
-It was way too obvious that Billy was a bad guy from nearly moment one
Still, I’d put it at the front rank of the Netflix Marvels, along with Jessica Jones and Daredevil Season 1.
I really liked it a lot too. I am somewhat immune to blood and gore from watching so much violence on shows, movies, etc, but man…there were a few scenes where I felt the urge to look away, much like Micro was feeling when he helped Curtis remove that arrow remnant from the Punisher’s shoulder.
IIRC, they once had a character opine that Frank Castle is – well, consider what happened to Bruce Wayne: his family was gunned down in front of him when he was just a little kid, and in response he came up with the idea of wearing a Halloween costume and using cool toys with a neato theme; and if another kid someday gets orphaned by a crook? Shucks, it makes sense to me that you’d put on a yellow cape and some elf boots and no pants; let’s go save lives!
Now imagine you say “hey, look, I freely grant all of that – but what if that happened to him when he was a grown man who’d served in the military?”