GLOOM & DOOM
Netflix’s ‘Punisher’ lacks dark humor of Marvel comics
Marvel has been trying to make the Punisher a household name since 1989, when Dolph Lundgren starred in the first big-screen adaptation of the gun-happy anti-hero. Since then, Thomas Jane in 2004 and Ray Stevenson in 2008 have donned the skull T-shirt and raised arms against evildoers. No one has made much of an impression. Now Marvel tries one more time by spinning off the trigger-happy vigilante into his own series from “Marvel's Daredevil.”
The show fits well into the Netflix stable (including “Marvel's Jessica Jones” and “Marvel's Luke Cage”): It's a dank, depressing series made on too little money that could have been vastly improved by cutting the episode order by at least a third.
At 13 hours, you'll feel as if you're the one being punished for something.
For those determined to binge, feel free to skip the first hour, which is just an extended prologue as Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal, best known from “The Walking Dead”), having avenged his family's deaths in the last season of “Daredevil,” lives incognito as a construction worker.
In an extended metaphor that might give you a concussion, Frank pounds a wall into oblivion. Frank would just like to be left alone to swing his own hammer, but, of course, evil rears its ugly head, as it likes to do on shows like this.
Frank did some horrible things while working as part of an elite military squad in Afghanistan, and the past is coming to collect in blood.
Elsewhere, a federal agent named Dinah Madani
(Amber Rose Revah, “Emerald City”) is trying to get justice for an Afghan police officer who was murdered there.
One of Frank's ex-military buddies, Curtis Hoyle
(Jason R. Moore), runs a support group for veterans. Another, Billy Russo (Ben Barnes, “Westworld”), heads a private security company.
An NSA analyst who goes by the handle Micro (significant to Marvel readers and played by Amherst native Ebon Moss-Bacharach, “Girls”) is determined to forge an alliance with Frank. “Daredevil” regular Deborah Ann Woll pops up as reporter Karen Page to push the plot along.
In the best “Punisher” stories, most written by Garth
Ennis, Frank is a single-minded sociopath determined to kill bad guys, typically mobsters, typically in hails of bullets and explosions of blood and body parts. The stories stand as some of the most darkly funny and gory mainstream comics published. If ammo was turned into snowflakes, Frank Castle's New York City would be under 20 feet of snow.
“Marvel's The Punisher” concludes on a note that suggests healing, if not redemption for Frank.
That just misses the entire point of the character.
Frank Castle knows he's going to hell. He just wants to take as many people with him as possible.