If you read Marvel comics in the 80s, or you have vintage back issues, you might remember Stan Lee’s monthly column in which he reported the company’s latest Hollywood developments. To hear Lee tell it, any summer now Marvel characters were gonna be all over the multiplexes as sure as Ronnie loves Nancy. When New World Pictures bought Marvel, things looked good.
Then New World’s first Marvel feature film, The Punisher, came out straight-to-video and things looked bad.
(Other tangible pieces of New World-Marvel brand name synergy that I recall: Two Hulk TV-movies, a comic adaptation of House II: The Second Story and a short-lived Sledge Hammer! comics series.)
In the old detective B-movie tradition, The Punisher feels like it’s taken from a script that could be adapted for most ANY character. In an afternoon at his IBM word processor, a rewrite man could change this to yet one more loose cannon cop flick of the time (Frank Castle here is an ex-policeman, as opposed to the ex-military man in the comics). Or maybe a Cobra sequel. How about another Action Jackson? Chuck Norris could have done it. Charles Bronson, too. Steven Seagal. Van Damme. With the story’s Yakuza element, the possibilites open ever wider. The lead could be of any nationality and no one would think twice.
Dolph Lundgren is as good a fit for the part as anybody. There seems to be nothing happening behind his eyes. Dolph could be a killing machine, he could be a washing machine. He’s as expressionless as ground beef from the supermarket. Half his performance is dyeing his hair black; the other half are grunts, sneers and delivering his few lines like he’s got bowling balls for testicles. His costume is generic Badass in Black, with the only reference to the comics being a skull about the size of a jellybean on the handle of his knives.
It’s low-budget kitsch today. The dull action scenes are executed through a rote series of close-ups. It wasn’t exciting at the time, when I spent good allowance money renting this letdown, and it’s not exciting in any way decades later, either.
The Punisher truly punishes us all.