The Punisher, Season 2, Episode 1: Roadhouse Blues
I didn't review The Punisher's second season back in January when it first came out. Both being sort of burnt out on superheroes at the time and finding the dreary, super-serious tone of Netflix superhero shows to be something that was a massive chore to watch ended up with me sort of putting this off. Plus, the announcement of all of the Netflix shows' abrupt cancellation in favour of Disney's own streaming service has definitely left a bad, bad taste in the fans of Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and the Punisher. And the one or two of you who unironically like Danny Bland, I suppose. And while I did immensely enjoy the first season of The Punisher... its sophomore season starts off with an honestly underwhelming episode.
Part of the appeal of a Netflix show is that it releases its entire season's worth of episodes all at once. In this case, thirteen episodes. But man oh man, it really took a long, long time -- over two weeks of me trying to watch this episode before finally completing its hour-long runtime -- and realize that the amount of things that happen here could've been resolved in way less than half the screentime. And I realize that there's nothing wrong with setting up the mood of a show, or to slowly show how Frank Castle ends up going from "he realizes how fucked up he is and goes to anger therapy" at the end of the first season to doing a lot more punishing in this season... but, y'know, I really felt that this episode was genuinely underwhelming. It's well-shot, yes. There are a lot of great individual scenes. But it is also obviously just a first chapter that's just waiting for the one-hour screentime to wind down so that it can get to its third act climax.
Because as compelling of an actor as Jon Bernthal is, they really could've gotten the point across in so much less screentime. Basically, he befriends and starts kind of a fling with a bartender called Beth after a sequence of events. Long bar scene, asshole comes up, Frank defends her but not in a macho way, they hook up, there's a kid involved, pancakes are involved, backstories are involved. Yadda yadda yadda, all to kind of disguise that Beth is sort of a cheap way for the show to introduce a faux love interest and a symbolism of Frank's potential of returning to what amounts to a normal life.
Again, it's nice that we do get to see Frank slowly starting to open up -- not just romantically, but also about his backstory... but we spend way too much time in these scenes. All the while, the B-plot of Vague Crime Syndicate Conspiracy really honestly fail to grab my attention. I applaud them giving the Hand a rest at last, but our new villain talking about "providence" or whatever, torturing a guy in a chair, and sending hitmen after a mysterious girl called Amy who's caught up in all this... it's all ominous, but not that interesting, y'know? Like, sure, it's setup, but everything that we see here is so gosh-darned generic that it's hard to really get invested.
And then, of course, Frank's literal attempt to stop wandering and stay for another night at the bar to meet with Beth again gets interrupted when he sees Amy get accosted by the assassins, leading to a brutal fight in the bathroom, then another brutal fight in the bar where a lot of the signs of Frank's potential civilian life get oh-so-unsubtly-symbolically destroyed in a hail of gunshots. That poor bouncer gets straight-up murdered, the bar gets shot up, and Beth gets shot in the shoulder, all the while muttering about her child as Frank is forced to pull off even more Punisher brutality to get her to the hospital. Throw in an utterly unnecessary in medias res prologue in the beginning, and honestly, I felt like even the huge revelation that Frank was able to snap back to such casual brutality after spending 30-40 minutes being Mr. Charismatic Nice Guy ends up feeling kinda bleh. Basically, Frank wins, killing all of the mooks, gets Beth to the hospital (which only barely manages to subvert the "romantic interest gets killed to give main character angst and motivation", but barely) and is now about to unravel another criminal conspiracy with the mysterious teenager blonde girl Amy.
Oh, and Billy Russo's waking up from his coma like a good recurring villain, but has a weird shattered-porcelain mask someone put on him that I can't decide if it's utterly ridiculous and can't be taken seriously, or an actually neat and fun little stylization of his comic-book counterpart's Jigsaw moniker.
Overall, though... I kinda want to say that this is a decent first chapter, but it's so gosh-darned slow and so little actually happened, and everything is so decompressed in the name of showing off some 'normalcy', when in reality it's just really kind of boring and I wished they had tightened things up. Not necessarily with action scenes all the time, but with something genuinely exciting or dramatic, y'know? I don't mind Frank's Normal Life as the prologue, particularly with how the first season ended, but the fact that we spent so long seemingly for no good reason just to fill up time ended up with me really finding it hard to enjoy -- or, hell, even finish watching -- this episode at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment