A look at The Punisher on film

So I revisited Punisher: Dirty Laundry for the first time in years and had…thoughts.

I’m kind of torn on whether or not I like this. I remember loving it when I was an edgy 22 year old. Watching it now…it’s technically great. Well constructed short film. Tight, well directed. Good acting. Badass Tom Jane and Ron Pearlman. The ending is perfect, right up to the reveal that the stranger is, in fact, The Punisher. One thing keeps me from loving this, and it’s a matter of personal morality…The Punisher lets a woman get r*****. He has the power to stop it the whole time, but for whatever existential, crisis-of-purpose reason…he knowingly walks on by and goes about his day while a woman is r***** (loudly) in a nearby alley. Sure, she gets to burn the monster who did it alive…but she still had to go through that, and it could have been stopped. Now, I have no illusions that The Punisher is a “good person.” He’s always been, essentially, a serial killer with a code that he lives by. It’s what makes him a perfect foil to Daredevil. He’s not a hero. He’s a necessary evil (at least that’s the central theme of most of his best stories). This part of the movie just really bothered me, but I guess it’s supposed to. A big theme of the short film is that the world has gone to shit and nobody cares anymore. Frank Castle finds the drive to start punishing again when a young boy is about to be murdered by the same gangster who r***** the woman. It’s a solid, thematic sequence of events that tie into one another in a cohesive, meaningful way. But, like…you couldn’t rediscover your humanity 10 minutes ago while a woman was brutalized for the purpose of character development? I guess fridging is an essential component to the punisher’s story. It’s his whole damn origin. The guy can’t function without some woman get exploited and boiled down to a story beat (granted it was his whole family, but still). Oh well.

To be honest, I low key love both of the previous Punisher movies. They have such drastically different vibes, with Warzone being much campier and more akin to a grindhouse/80s slasher film (from the perspective of the slasher). And what happened to Lexi Alexander was absolutely horrendous and I hope she gets to have a BIG comeback some day. But the Tom Jane film is just iconic to me. The whole urban spaghetti western meets the melodrama a mob film vibe. The larger than life characters. The score is amazing. This needed a sequel. And Jonathan Hensleigh is another director who deserved way better. Dude directs explosions like it’s an art form…without cgi.

Jon Bernthal is really good as Punisher in his own right, but even then I don’t find his solo show to be all that impressive. He was better used as an antagonist in Daredevil: Season 2. Overall, my favorite Punisher is definitely Tom Jane…but I think his best use as a character was in Daredevil. He works best as a moral, antagonistic foil to a proper hero like Daredevil or even Spider-Man. But the movies still rule in their own right. 💀