Now that Frank Castle has finished his Death Wish To Do List, what's in store for the one man assault team?
Spoilers ahead.
Opening Sequence:
Interesting visual with the liquid, paint-like quality and the high contrast black and white. The music running through is alright, though I expected something a little more heavy metal than they chose.
Themes:
The Punisher is a tale about taking personal responsibility for your choices and their consequences. Frank cuts through the shields those powerful, wealthy, or connected enough have against the consequences of their actions. He is karma, personified.
He's also haunted by the thought that the things he did as a soldier put his family in harm's way.
Other characters struggle with the fallout of their choices, whether Micro having to watch the toll his "death" has taken on his family, Madani dealing with the death of her partner during a sting she lead, or Curtis fighting to hold onto his sense of worth and help other veterans do the same.
Contrasting all this is Lewis, who labels everyone who disagrees with him an enemy and refuses to own up to his mistakes.
Acting:
There's no bad acting here, as we've come to expect from a Marvel/Netflix production. But there wasn't much range required for most of the actors.
Joe Bernthal's Frank Castle is mostly monosyllabic and either sad or enraged at any given point in the show. We do see glimpses of a much more normal and nuanced Castle in flashback sequences.
The highlights of the show, in my opinion, were Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jamie Ray Newman as David "Micro" Lieberman and his wife, Sarah.
Ebon in particular vacillates from confident, even cocky, in his initial meetings with Frank to tortured to jealous to relieved and back again.
Writing:
There are several things that the writers of the show didn't do that I want to highlight.
First, they did not excuse Frank entirely for actions. The Punisher, comeuppance incarnate that he is, is portrayed as a necessary evil, not a role model. In fact, his attempts at being one evaporate immediately when his identity is revealed to those looking up to him. The consequences of Frank's choices, to him and those he cares for, beg the question "When does it stop being worth it?"
Second, the writers did not make Agent Madani a Mary Sue. I was very concerned about the direction of her character in the first episode. But the writers (through the characters of Sam Stein and Rafi, mostly) manage to humanize her into a competent, driven agent instead of a demi-goddess.
Lastly, they avoided the temptation to make everyone involved in law enforcement incompetent or evil.
Kudos to the writing team for all three of those decisions.
Additionally, the writers for the show understand their characters. Motivations make sense and everyone acts in concert with those motivations. This one thing places The Punisher well over Iron Fist and ahead of most of the DC films to date.
Sadly, not all writing decisions can be placed in the "Win" column.
Let's start with Madani and Castle having a "joust" in their muscle cars.
Why on earth is that scene in there?
It makes no sense and even if it did, Madani is driving a classic 1969 Mustang Mach 1 . Frank is driving the modern version. Hers wins that particular game of chicken by virtue of being made of steel rather than plastic.
Speaking of things that have no need to be there, let's talk about Lewis. Lewis is, as discussed above, a counterpoint to Frank on the responsibility axis. You know who else rationalizes his choices? The actual bad guy.
Lewis isn't really an antagonist; he's a plot device. But because of that his character arc goes nowhere. He doesn't change, doesn't seek help, and he contributes almost nothing to the story. He is there to set Frank up as a terrorist (because, y'know, the head of Covert Operations for the CIA couldn't have arranged that without help...) and provide the catalyst for the confrontation at the hotel.
Nothing he does before that matters, but he eats a huge amount of screen time.
Then there's Donny Chavez, the idiot kid who's sole purpose is to get in trouble in the first episode so Frank has to bail him out by killing a building full of mobsters.
Honestly, almost the entire episode could have been cut. Show him hammering his way through his anger at the construction site, then have Micro call him at the diner. How did he find Frank? Who cares! He's the flippin' Wizard!
And now, at last, we come to Madani and Russo.
I buy their relationship. I buy both characters' reasoning for it. Do we really need three separate scenes of them in bed together, let alone her wearing bandages and bruises from her car crash? Seems like a cracked rib would put a damper on things for a bit.
Seriously, they have two moments of anything close to intimacy that matters: when he's washing her partner's blood off her in the bath and the moment she realizes he's the bad guy.
The latter of those two scenes is one of the dumbest reveals I've ever seen. He basically confesses rather than just SHOOTING FRANK AGAIN. I am really tired of here-to-fore smart villains suddenly becoming incompetent because "Plot!"
Let Madani find a version of the Assassin's Blade in his office or something and put two and two together. Bonus if he doesn't realize she knows and you get the tension of double cat-and-mouse games between them.
Speaking of tension...
Action:
It's the missing ingredient in the action of the show.
Don't get me wrong. The writers get The Punisher. They know fans are there to watch Frank take the bad guys apart with superior firepower and a dogged refusal to lay down and die. And they deliver.
The violence is graphic and nearly ubiquitous. People are shot with bullets (and arrows), stabbed, blown up, pummeled with a sledgehammer, fall prey to home-made traps, and beaten with fists and feet. Frank hits a cop with a thrown brick and slams another repeatedly with a car door as part of an escape attempt.
Wartime violence is on display in multiple flashbacks. Several people are tortured. One character is knocked out with a poisoned needle. One has his head slammed against a mirror and his face shoved into the resulting glass fragments.
In all of this, the outcome is certain. Of course Frank is going to walk away. The question is, how will he do it and what will it cost him to do so?
Here the writers and choreographers let us down. The camera work is very competent, but not interesting. The deaths are mostly to gunfire or a quick stab. Some are snapped necks. We don't get much in the way of Batman-like ambush tactics, just FPS style run-and-gun.
Because there are so many deaths in this show, the viewer just gets numb to it all and it loses shock value. So the writers keep making them more grisly.
Additionally, Castle nearly dies four or five times, collapsing from his injuries only to hobble away, patch himself up (miraculously, but it is a comic book property), and head back out to do it again. By the last time, it's robbed his injuries of any tension.
Not only that, but one scene is so ridiculous the show ventures into self parody for a moment. I refer, of course, to Curtis being beaten unconscious with his own prosthetic leg. I couldn't tell if they meant for us to be horrified or to snicker like eleven-year-olds who've overheard a naughty joke.
All these things cause the tension to bleed out of the on screen fights, especially when interspersed with the slower, soap-opera moments of drama.
Summary:
I'm not the biggest Punisher fan out there. He works best as deuteragonist or erstwhile antagonist for a more main stream hero from the comics. That was part of the reason he worked so well in Daredevil.
Here, the writers aren't entirely sure what to do with him. As a result, the show slips on the blood and the bumpy plot and falls down for a while.
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