IT ISN'T healthy (or so my therapist tells me) for one grown-up to feel the need to punish another for behavior he deems inappropriate. While the impulse may not be sound, I'm sure it's fairly common, at least based on the perennial popularity of such films as "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Death Wish," "Walking Tall" and "Kill Bill Vol. 2" (see review on this page). What, after all, is the basis for the comic book superhero, most every example of whom decides to embark upon his or her career of righting society's wrongs only after having been traumatized by some personal injury or another?
Enter the Punisher, yet another screwed-up Marvel Comics character whose difficult transition from average citizen to costumed (okay, skull-T-shirted) avenger is charted in a new film of the same name. Unlike some of its recent ilk – "Spider-Man," for example – "The Punisher" is, no disrespect, a thoroughly morose and bilious affair. That is precisely what I like best about it.
Thomas Jane plays a man out for revenge after a mobster murders his entire family in "The Punisher," based on the Marvel Comics story.
(Gene Page -- Lions Gate Films)
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Unlike Spidey, Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) has no Mary Jane Watson to smooth his wrinkled brow at the end of the day. Well, he did at one point, but his wife (Samantha Mathis) is brutally murdered in the film's first half-hour, along with Frank's son, his parents, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, the massacre having taken place during a family reunion on one of Puerto Rico's apparently numerous deserted beaches. Eaten alive by his own need to retaliate against those who have harmed him, Frank then sets out to inflict as much pain as possible on the mobster who ordered his family's murder, Howard Saint (John Travolta).
First, Frank strikes at Saint's wallet, giving away the capo's ill-gotten gains. Then, Iago-like, he insinuates untruths about Saint's wife (Laura Harring) and Saint's best friend and consigliere (Will Patton), causing Saint to slowly turn against his own inner circle. Meanwhile, Frank is off dispatching Saint's sundry goons and hit men by such traditional punitive methods as knife, fist, boot, gun, bomb, hot soup and paper-cutter blade.
Dumb fun though they may be, these are not the bilious and morose parts I was talking about. My favorite scenes occur quietly inside Frank's squalid apartment building, where our hero, as often as not soused on Wild Turkey, interacts with his three equally misfit neighbors: Dave (Ben Foster), a computer geek with multiple piercings; Bumpo (John Pinette), an obese young opera lover; and Joan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), a mousy waitress with an abusive boyfriend. The quartet's awkward scenes together – at a home-cooked dinner, for instance, at which each person says what he or she is thankful for – are funny and touching. Although director Jonathan Hensleigh and his co-writer, Michael France, could certainly have succumbed to making Frank's freak friends the vehicles for his salvation (Joan, especially, as a cute substitute for Frank's dead wife), they don't.
And bless them for it.
When "The Punisher" is deep into the parceling out of penance, it is not that different from any one of myriad revenge dramas. But when it shows its antiheroic hero struggling – and failing – to rekindle his flickering humanity, the pleasure we take in his inability to resist his basest instincts is like taking a bite of deliciously dark chocolate: probably bad for us, definitely bitter, but still sweet and stimulating.
THE PUNISHER (R, 124 minutes) – Contains obscenity, glimpses of partial nudity and much violence. Area theaters.
