Saw the trailer. It doesn’t look too good, Frank.
Of course, most of the really avid detractors of the last movie are wetting themselves with glee, using their trademark elastic reasoning to somehow validate their condemnations of the 2004 flick via the decision of the producers to reboot the series. Hey, if they want a pouty, emo merc that shamelessly emotes the best of Troy Duffy and John Woo minus the eloquence and creativity, then I’ll bring the party favors. Fuck it, Dude.
I’ve always felt that the most denigrating of reviews for Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Punisher were never fair, or even all that relevant to the film itself to begin with. People saw the movie, couldn’t immediately discern exactly what turned them off of it and ran behind whichever filmsnot catchphrase (‘poor character development’ , ‘totally forgettable’, ‘I was bored’) they had on hand in order to push their butthurts out and into print without so much as an asterisk next the no-doubt damning byline they had affixed to it. Most reviews just nailed it up to a shiny, film school-built crucifix and that was that. In contrast, the reviews for both Hulk films have been (surprisingly) evenly well-constructed across the board by most critics and audiences. I prefer the first one by far, as I feel that a monster movie can only be as good as the moral conflict experienced by the principal characters. Ang Lee took that caveat, stapled it to a book on Freudian method and ran with it as far as he could, even though the trip was a doggedly sluggish one throughout. For me, the action scenes more than made up for that shortcoming. Primarily, it’s a good monster movie and secondly, a good comic book movie and a rarity in that it doesn’t cheat it’s own motives by derailing the entire thing with some drawn-out, mindlessly violent, CGI-bloated smackdown at the end. The Hulk’s greatest enemy has always been himself.
I did see the other Hulk last weekend, like I had just mentioned, and I can safely say that there are a lot of people out there who will enjoy it but for notably different reasons. You’ll find no ruminations upon the darkness of the human soul here, just a lot of punching, explosions and really slick photography. The script treads along like a 2-hour work for a main event wrestling match, chewing up colloquial speech like a puck of Red Man and spitting it back at you in the form of a big, green fist to your balls. And yeah, the match itself wasn’t half-bad, despite the somewhat unbelievable conclusion. But don’t go into this affair expecting another date with Tony Stark. Sadly, the most enjoyment I got out of the movie was in the final 30 seconds. That, and the actual Hulk creature model just looked fucking out of synch.
It’s a contest of perceptions with these touchy geeks, you know? You want to do everything that you can to tell a story that will not only respect the source material but also, simply, make for an entertaining flick. Some elements are going to lost in making the transition between mediums but with purists, it seems like they’d rather have the movie not be made and keep the thread of that universe wrap tightly around their own minds, never to be molested by the hands of another. Taking that into account, I can see why so many old-school Punisher freaks would get their knickers in a twist over the radically comical grit of Hensleigh’s movie as it is a vast departure from the majority of that character’s ‘classic’ outings. But if you’re going to put this next to Garth Ennis’s recent reworking of the franchise and yell foul, you’re simply being pig-headed. The economical settings, the silent nature of the protagonist, the outrageously methodical cruelty, the constant allusions to classic film culture (specifically, period action flicks of the ’70’s and spaghetti westerns) are all there. The tonality is retained between the two entities.
There is no fucking reason whatsoever that The Punisher got the penning that it did, except for the fact that most nerds just didn’t see a comic-book adaptation that fit into the mold that they expect: Garish, shallow, histrionic and without conviction. Kind of like that trailer up there.
‘I’d like to get my hands on God.’ Gah, go face-soak your fucking t-shirt at a Static X concert, greaser.
