Movie Review: The Punisher (2004)

The Punisher (2004)

I reviewed this movie a while back in 2021, but I rewatched the 'extended edition' recently in my slow attempt to catch up with a lot of older superhero material. And... my opinions have changed a fair bit that I decided to re-write and re-publish the review of The Punisher 2004. Having watched the 1989 adaptation starring Dolph Lundgren also helped for me to get some new perspectives. 

Right on the bat, I do feel like 2004's The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the titular Punisher, ends up being a bit more faithful to the comics compared to the 1989 movie. Jane's Punisher actually goes around wearing the skull vest (albeit only in his first and last outing), for one. And we also get the appearance of some of Punisher's minor supporting cast from the comics (such as assassins like The Russian or Harry Heck; or ones like Mickey Duka and Specker Dave). Arguably, the movie also acts as a nicer introduction to the Punisher, actually showing us Frank Castle's origin story in a more detailed manner instead of treating it as an afterthought. Having his origin story be tied to the first criminal syndicate that Punisher wipes out also gives us a more tangible crime for Frank to 'punish', although your mileage may vary on how effective it is as a proper adaptation of the Punisher. It's not the best, but we also get a lot more scenes focusing on Frank's turmoil and torment compared to the '89 movie, which had Frank more of a reactive character.

The movie isn't without its faults, though, and a huge chunk does lie with its first act. While I do praise the 2004 adaptation for actually drawing out the deaths of Frank's family, and tying it to the first criminals that Frank hunts down... it feels a bit too long and a bit too needlessly cruel?

We start off with Frank as an undercover cop that's about to retire and finally be there for his family. The final operation, however, results in the death of Bobby Saint, overeager son of the mafia boss Howard Saint. The initial scenes of the movie focuses on Howard Saint (a very entertaining John Travolta, who surprisingly doesn't chew the scenery as much as you think he would in a role like this) reacting to this death and trying to figure out and 'punish' the one responsible for Bobby's death. This leads to him sending a whole-ass hitman squad to hunt down Frank Castle's family. 

...And Frank Castle's family? Instead of just being his wife and kids being killed in the crossfire of crime, it's his entire extended family, including his parents and like around a dozen assorted cousins and nephews and nieces, that gets summarily hounded down and murdered by Saint's minions in an honestly gratuitously long scene that gets a bit uncomfortable to watch... but also... we kind of get it? You don't really need to show Maria Castle driving around on a car for so long, y'know, and I kind of wanted them to 'get on' with the plot. 

There is a nice little thematic tie-in of mutual revenge, where Howard Saint's entire deal is hunting for the man who killed his family, and Frank's motivation would later be similar. However, Howard's initial orders for only Frank to be killed ends up being amended to 'his whole family' by Howard's angry wife Livia. 

The extended edition restores around 15+ minutes of screentime that revolves around a subplot of Frank's traitorous partner James Weeks, who gets caught up in gambling debts during Howard Saint's investigation into the enigmatic arms dealer that resulted in the death of his son, and later on continues to appear throughout Frank's Punisher-ing as Frank mentally puts the pieces together in his head. This actually adds a nice little dynamic into Frank's world -- not just him wiping out a single mafia syndicate, but also him having to deal with a traitorous friend... a reason that actually makes a lot of the scenes with his wacky neighbours a lot more palatable now that there's an actual thematic thread. 

Speaking of which... yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the transition from the death of the Castle family to Frank's return as the Punisher. He just survives being shot and blown up into the ocean, and gets saved by a random fisherman... just because? The movie gives us a bit of an origin to Frank's overpreparedness with guns by his whole ex-military backstory and his dad also being a gun nut; and we get the excuse handwave of Frank Junior buying the skull shirt for his dad... but otherwise, next we see Frank, he's basically in all-business mode, all Punisher mode. He's emotionless, he hates the cops and the law for not investigating his family's death, he says badass one liners, and he refuses to make friends and keeps every single friendship attempt at arm's length. 

And... we just kind of cut away to him hanging out in an apartment with the three wacky neighbours -- a guy with a lot of metal piercings, Spacker Dave; a fat guy, Bumpo; and pretty waitress with an abusive boyfriend Joan (played by Rebecca Romijn, a.k.a. Mystique from X-Men). And I'll cover these wacky neighbours very quickly in that... they do suck up a lot of time. I don't think they're as bad as many other comedic relief characters in these movies, and I get what they're trying to do. Joan and later on the two guys really try to get Frank to open up with dinners and constant insistence that they are fellow losers and family. The themes of Frank really refusing any kind of companionship is done rather well. And in the extended edition this is contrasted nicely against Frank's betrayal by Agent Weeks, but I really don't think the chemistry between Frank and the other neighbours are particularly convincing. Frank does end up beating up and chasing off Joan's abusive boyfriend, which is a nice, short scene. 

I do like that Frank doesn't immediately jump Joan's bones, especially since he's still in mourning after Maria Castle's death. Joan was really thirsty, though. 

Frank meanwhile continues his investigation into the Saints' operations, kidnapping and "torturing" the nebbish and non-threatening henchman Mickey Duka. There's a bit of a moment where I realize that Frank does this because he has been interacting with Mickey while undercover, and as such he knows Mickey is harmless... hence, the whole sequence where he gives a vivid description of the sensation of being tortured with a burning-hot iron being 'cold', and Frank pretending to torture Mickey while burning some steak (which makes the smell of burnt meat) and pressing a popsicle against Mickey's back. It's a scene lifted from Punisher MAX, and I thought this was a nice little way to show that Frank isn't too far gone. The movie doesn't immediately explain why Frank was nicer to Mickey and trusts him to be his man-on-the-inside on the Saints' operations, however, and Mickey himself also notably has no character resolution at the end of the movie after his plot relevance is over. 

Frank ends up doing a bit of an investigation into the Saint family, and ends up sketching up a plan to turn Howard Saint, Livia Saint, Howard's right-hand-man Quentin Glass, and their business partner the Toro Brothers against each other. And we do get a couple of cool scenes of Frank either investigating and making up elaborate plans, or just going full-on skull-shirt-and-shotguns and attacking Howard Saint's bank and tossing money to the public. The 'detective' scenes admittedly feels rather off, since ultimately Frank ends up doing some 5D-chess-mind-games stuff that involves him framing Quentin and Livia for having an affair, which later on leads to the over-possessive Howard being deathly jealous of his best friend and his wife. This also comes with the (unfortunate with modern values) scenes of Frank finding the scandal that Quentin is actually homosexual, and uses these pictures to blackmail Quentin Glass and make him move around where he wants. 

While this is all going on, Howard Saint gets more and more frustrated, and it is nice to see John Travolta's acting -- Travolta is easily the strongest actor in this movie (though that's not to Thomas Jane's fault; his direction requires him to be a bit more static) and it is pretty fun to see him slowly go off the hinges. 

The next part of the movie ends up being a bit campier and more comic-book-y than the rest of it, though, and perhaps not in a good way. Despite apparently knowing where Frank Castle lives, Howard Saint sends... three waves of assassins, each of whom arrive at different timings and acts separately? The first assassin, Harry Heck (played by musician Mark Collie) is perhaps the most memorable for showing up in a diner and playing a whole-ass country song about how he's going to kill Frank... and Frank does nothing. And instead of embracing some ridiculousness and doing something with the guitar, Harry Heck just attacks Frank by tailgating him and shooting his car a whole bunch. Frank kills Harry with a shootable pocket knife, and... yeah, okay. 

The next assassin, The Russian, is an unstoppable giant strongman that fights Frank in probably the most fun action scene in the movie, where he and Frank just bashes their way around the apartment complex. I do like the theme of this fight, where Frank actually lets his guard down after having some dinner with his wacky neighbours... but I'm unconvinced that half of the fight needed to take place with cutaways to the neighbours doing wacky singing. This fight was fun, though. 

And then, the third wave of assassins are just a bunch of gunmen who show up and torture Spacker Dave, ripping out all of his face piercings and demanding that they give up where Frank is hiding. And... this scene is kind of full of a bit of rather glaring plot holes. Why didn't the gunmen arrive with the Russian? Why don't they kill Dave and Bumpo? Why did Dave and Bumpo actually stay behind, wouldn't it be easier for them all to escape? The idea of the scene is solid, with the neighbours 'taking a bullet' for Frank, but it just makes the mafia look grossly incompetent. 

After Frank recovers from his injuries with the Russian, he implements his plan to frame Quentin Glass for sleeping with Livia. This one is a neat little sequence of scenes, and it does benefit a lot from John Travolta's Howard Saint slowly piecing together what he thinks is an affair in his head, growing increasingly more and more pissed off at his perceived betrayal. Howard Saint confronts Quentin Glass and murders the very confused and loyal man in his own house; and goes home and attacks Livia, tossing him from a bridge into the path of the incoming train. Unfortunate modern-day implications aside, this is actually surprisingly cruel on Frank Castle's part, and it does give a nice little mafia flair to the movie's plot as opposed to 'Frank shoots people up a lot'. 

Oh, speaking of Frank shooting people up, in the extended scene this is where Frank confronts Weeks after several brief meetings, and we get a pretty cool sequence of Frank pretending to leave his handgun (without bullets) unattended just to confirm if Weeks is really against him. And... the scene where he intimidates Weeks to basically kill himself is a bit dark, and I'm not sure if I really like it... but the theme of the movie is punishment, and all of these people getting royally fucked by Frank do deserve death. 

And then we get the final scene, where Frank dons a military vest with a skull spraypainted on it, pulls on a compound bow and arrow, and attacks Howard Saint's club and kills everyone inside. We get a nice gory scene where the blonde lead thug gets a knife graphically shoved up his lower jaw; and another cruel-and-unusual death as Howard's remaining son John is forced to hold a bomb that he will undoubtedly lose strength at some point. As Howard tries his best to get out of the building, Frank catches up, shoots him, and details in full detail that he killed his remaining son, and Quentin and Livia's deaths are all unfounded. Properly destroying Howard Saint's mind, Frank ties Howard to a moving car and sets it to auto-crash into a parking lot...

...at which point apparently Frank took the time to plant enough detonation charges that the explosion pattern looks like the Punisher logo. 

With his mission finished, we get a rather dark scene as Frank actually prepares to kill himself after the mission is done, really hammering home how broken a man like the Punisher is. He ends up not doing so after seeing a vision of his family, but he also leaves behind his newfound friends, and goes off to become the vigilante known as the Punisher. 

End credits. And... again, as with all adaptations of the Punisher, people's mileage varies a lot on whether this adaptation of the Punisher is 'too hard', 'too soft', misses the mark... and I feel that the movie does a decent job at both showing Frank as someone who has some degree of mercy (towards Mickey, towards Joan's abusive boyfriend, and how nice he is towards the neighbours) but also sometimes unnecessarily cruel (getting Howard to kill his closest friends, the way he kills John or Weeks). I do think the movie also has a lot of nice themes that it kind of doesn't follow up fully on -- I would've liked a more proper and definite answer on whether Frank 'finding a new family' is a good thing or not, and the movie really flip-flops about it in the final act. Ultimately, though, I did find this movie extremely enjoyable, and while I don't think it beats Jon Bernthal's Netflix Punisher, it's still a pretty fun watch regardless!