Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Punisher!

Article theme: just listen to the soundtrack, man.

When the Berenstein timeline forked off from our own, its Marvel chose to eschew le ironic quips and be 500% unironic chudkino, releasing nothing but sequels to 2004's The Punisher. This sole gem in the capeshit coalheap commits whole-assedly to its edgy remit. Thomas Jane's Frank Castle cracks scarcely an expression the whole runtime, pulling off the kind of cool of which we mortals only dream when we don our Columbine cosplays.

Me staring down the Asda security guard, knowing full well I turned down a receipt for my two dozen Cadbury's Creme Eggs at the till.

You know the story: Frank is an FBI agent in the movies where the FBI takes on dangerous mobsters instead of railroading old grannies who amble through the Capitol, so he incurs the wrath of mob boss John Travolta (Broken Arrow) and his wife Laura Harring (Mulholland Dr.), who orders Frank's whole family whacked as revenge for their late son. Frank alone survives to edgily take down the Travolta crime family in reverse-revenge or, as he puts it, punishment.

Much as I love you all, if this all-time Would Hall-of-Famer asked me to have your family whacked, I doubt I'd even feel bad about it.

Not content just to kill all the mobsters (though he does that too), Frank engineers an hilariously convoluted plot straight out of Orson Welles' blackface comedy Othello to convince Travolta that Harring is cucking him with his Village-Peoplely mustachioed consigliere, just to be a dick. I don't know if the scenes in which he goes as far as planting fire hydrants in front of her car to get her ticketed were meant to be Looney-Tunes-logic hysterical, but that's sure how they played to me. I wouldn't altogether write the humour off as inadvertent though; scenes featuring what I assume are bad guys from the comics (never read a damn one) lean more blatantly into cartoon mode:

Imagine being Thomas Jane and putting more work into acquiring the perfect ripped male body than I've put into everything in my life combined (no homo), then this fucking beast shows up on set.

An underrated moment has Frank contemplate the sorry state of his fridge contents as the big dude slams his head in it.

The finely-balanced humour aside, it's mostly quite a low-key, elegaic story of a man with nothing left to live for, who becomes a symbol of elusive justice; a ghost of sorts, like Eastwood's Preacher in Pale Rider. Bereaved and bereft, Frank sits alone in his room in the dark, drinking himself to death, no reason to get up tomorrow but to punish the guilty. The Morricone pastiche theme music is sadder, wearier, not gormlessly triumphant like the interchangeable themes of every latterday Marvel hero. The spaghetti western has become mythologised by those who've never seen one; in reality, most are sub-Mad Max ripoff in their quality and care, but The Punisher ekes out the poetry found in the best fistful of examples (OK, really it's all Morricone's contributions that redeem the genre, but we'll be nice).

Sorry babe, I'm stone cold incel. I don't even make eye contact with a woman (too autistic). See ya around...kid...

It's not hard to see why they never followed this up in our Berenstain timeline: the R rating put a hard cap on the potential for profit, half the prospective audience would have found the idea of a vigilante who actually kills people too heckin icky, and at some point you'd have had to break with the all-white cast of criminals for Frank to kill, which would have had the Death Wish moral-panickers squealing histrionically all over the web even back then. I give this one a pass from the safe-edgy stamp of shame only on the assumption that it's pretty much a comics-accurate origin story. Regardless, though, one well-judged, excellently-scored western-tinged chudcore classic easily outclasses every smarmy Em Cee Uuuniverse entry and offers just a hint of what might once have been, and what could be again in better times.

Sic semper soyjaks.