The Punisher
Director: Mark Goldblatt
Year: 1989
Rating: 7.0
This film should be in the Schlocky Action Low
Budget Hall of Fame. Frame for frame it has to be one of the more violent
films from that period that I have seen. I would even go so far as to say
this is Asian Action Good. It was produced in Australia at the tail end of
the Ozploitation era when horror, violence and nudity were splashed against
the screen in lurid colors. This film isn't really an official part of that
as it was produced by an American company (New World Entertainment who had
made a deal with Marvel) but it has the same spirit. It leaves out the horror
and sex and focuses on violence. It is after all The Punisher, a character
who has gained a lot more fame of late than he had back in 1989. He is out
of the Marvel stable showing up first in 1974 in some of the Spider-Man comic
books and later getting his own comic book in the 1980s. The original creator
said he was influenced by the Executioner books. I have never read any of
the comic books and only brushed up against him in the Daredevil TV show
but I never got very far into that. If it had been as cheesy and fun as this
one, I might have seen more.
Thankfully, this is not an origin story - one quick flashback to his family
being blown up and now he is in fulltime revenge mode. One guy asks him if
his need for revenge hasn't been satiated, he replies not yet and goes on
to kill multiples of more bad guys. Of course, he is way past revenge as
most of the people he kills had nothing to do with the death of his wife
and two children - it has become a dark obsession to kill bad guys and he
lives in the sewers to show just how serious he is. And who better to portray
such a complex character - to bring out shades of his psyche - the
pain inside than Dolph Lundgren, master thespian of emotional discharge.
Lundgren has slightly more dialogue than a mime and that is a good thing.
He does his best acting in silence, eyes glaring mode. But no one comes to
one of these ridiculous action fests for the acting, they come for the bang
for your buck action and this film is chockful of it as well as dead bodies.
Killed in a myriad of ways - broken neck, explosions, knife, sword, spear,
dart, guns of course, thrown off a high place, run over by a car and probably
a few ways that I have forgotten. I should not admit to finding it entertaining
and occasionally saying "ouch that must have hurt". But it was entertaining
for the kind of film it was trying to be.
Lady Tanaka (Kim Miyori) to a mafia gangster "We are the Yakuza. When your
ancestors were still screwing sheep in Europe, we were the crime Lords of
Asia" as she breaks his fingers. Lady Tanaka and her killer female employee
are not people to mess with as the Mafia finds out. When they are not killing
them, the Punisher is. But when the Yakuza kidnaps their children, the soft
side of the Punisher shows up. He kills pretty much everyone to save them.
His old cop partner (Louis Gosset Jr.) has been chasing him for five years
and is still chasing him to this day I expect. The main Mafia villain is
played by the ultra-smooth Jeroen Krabbe.
There are some good set pieces in the film - a restaurant where all the customers
calmly eating their meals all turn out to be Yakuza or the fun house killing
ground when Ninjas by the dozens zip down the slide to kill the Punisher,
the bus ride where some stuntman jumps through the front window as it comes
at him and the finale which is a blood bath of death and Lady Tanaka in white
faced geisha mode like a woman returned from hell. It felt almost like a
1960s Ken Takakura film as he walks into the main villain's head quarters
and leaves a line of dead bodies for others to collect.
The director Mark Goldblatt hasn't directed many films but he was an editor
on The Terminator I and II, Rambo II, Enter the Ninja, Commando, Predator
II and others - so he knows his way around an action scene.
