Watch out for ‘The Punisher’
Marvel’s ★☆☆☆ vigilante comes to Netflix.
The Punisher is a simplistic series in a complicated world.
The gun-happy Marvel series (Netflix, streaming Friday, **) has had a tumultuous trip to screens, after a New York Comic-Con panel was canceled and its release date was pushed back after the mass shootings in Las Vegas last month. But there have been more mass shooting in the country since, including one at a church in Texas.
There’s a certain queasiness to watching the series in this context, and a smarter show than The Punisher might have offered something that could add to the conversation. Unfortunately, the series is mostly a dull, superficial shoot-’em-up.
Frank Castle was first seen in Netflix’s Daredevil in March 2016 and was established as a gun-toting vigilante out to avenge the deaths of his wife and chil- dren. By the time The Punisher begins, Castle is presumed dead and trying to blend in under an assumed name. His anonymity is short-lived when a former NSA analyst, David Lieberman (aka Micro, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach), seeks him out and uncovers a potential government conspiracy tied to the deaths of Castle’s family.
The Punisher is the sixth NetflixMarvel collaboration and by far the most formulaic. It’s excruciatingly slow, and it struggles to develop its subplots about a Homeland Security agent (Amber Rose Revah) who seeks justice for a murdered friend and the relationship between Castle and Lieberman’s wife, Sarah (Jaime Ray Newman), who believes her husband is dead.
Despite the poor material they’re given, the cast is talented, especially Bernthal. He synthesizes the angry, brutal energy he perfected in The Walking Dead and movies like The Wolf of Wall Street into a man defined by little other than rage. Moss-Bachrach, known for playing Desi on Girls, shows off a very different side of himself as Lieberman, a tormented man turned unwitting sidekick.
The Punisher is inextricably bound to its guns; its scenes mark an operatic deployment of gunshots by its anti-hero, who carries out unspeakable acts against those who have wronged him and those he considers criminal. The series’ obsession with guns carries over to its smoky opening credits, which zoom in on the assembly of weapons before the Punisher’s skull logo is sculpted out of handguns and automatic rifles.
Perhaps the series’ biggest problem is that it doesn’t use its relentless violence, or its story of a moody vigilante, to make any larger point. Creator Steve Lightfoot also worked on the über-violent Hannibal, which applied a more deft hand to graphic visuals. The Punisher feints at asking bigger questions — about whether you can trust authority, how soldiers handle re-entry into the civilian population, how people deal with trauma — but never really answers them and ultimately returns to a more conventional narrative of a haunted man violently righting wrongs.
It may seem as if The Punisher wants to live in gray areas, but it ends up lamely sticking to black and white.