The Travolta/Cage Project #70 The Punisher (2004)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
One of the many curious things John Travolta and Nicolas Cage have in common is that they both starred in Marvel movies before the creation of the MCU made that a big deal.
When Travolta played the heavy in the 2004 reboot of The Punisher with Thomas Jane and Nicolas Cage became the Ghost Rider in 2007 Marvel had certainly made an impact on the world of film, if not quite to the degree its distinguished competition at D.C had with the twin big bangs of Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was a critical and commercial smash and X-Men proved there was a huge audience for movies about superhero teams. Blade similarly illustrated that you didn’t need an A-list, household name superhero like Superman or Batman to create a hit franchise.
But Marvel didn’t become the white-hot epicenter of pop culture until the zeitgeist-capturing release of 2008’s Iron Man and the many inter-connected blockbusters that followed, many featuring Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and Stan Lee doing his Stan Lee thing with his Stan Lee cameos, a key component of the Stan Lee brand.
Marvel would eventually become the biggest of big deals with box office monsters like Avengers: Endgame but I distinctly remember looking at the poster for The Punisher before its release and thinking that Travolta was slumming it just a little by playing the bad guy in a Thomas Jane movie.
Of course The Punisher isn’t just any Thomas Jane movie. Instead it’s a second cinematic showcase for one of the darkest and most uncompromisingly grim anti-heroes in all of pop culture, a deranged vigilante whose iconography has been co-opted by the Blue Lives Matter crowd despite the character’s very existence being a stern rebuke to the mindless deification of law enforcement.
The Punisher is canonically different from other superheroes. He’s more broken, bitter and psychotic, an avenging force of the night who makes a point of going too far.
In a religiously PG or PG-13 genre, The Punisher is a hard R anti-hero or he’s nothing at all. The Punisher was hard R before it was cool or profitable. A solitary kind of psychopath, The Punisher does not play well with others or fit snugly into a group dynamic.
In this version of the classic tale, Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher is vengeance incarnate, a man of violence who loses everything he loves and becomes a creature of pure instinct, a killing machine of ruthless efficiency. But in Jonathan Hensleigh’s messily compelling iteration of the iconic American badass he’s also, confusingly but semi-delightfully, also something of a Bugs Bunny trickster character.
As played by Thomas Jane, Frank Castle, AKA The Punisher is the broken, rage-filled blunt instrument of the comics and Hot Topic tee shirts but he also’s a bit of a wascally wabbit who toys with his enemies the same way Bugs messed relentlessly with the brittle egos of Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam.
When Frank Castle is attacked by The Russian, a massive behemoth in a white and red shirt played by Kevin Nash of professional wrestling and Magic Mike fame, the movie briefly becomes a live-action Popeye short directed by Nicolas Winding-Refn, with Castle as an overmatched Popeye and the massive grappler as a muscle-bound Bluto.
Jane’s Castle is introduced undercover with died blonde hair and an ostentatiously phony Russian accent, an early indication that Jane’s take on the iconic sourpuss will be dark and hyper-violent but also surprisingly playful.
The operation is a success that results in the fake-death of Castle and the real death of one of the sons of money laundering kingpin Howard Saint (John Travolta). Saint has a reverence for family that puts Dom Toretto to shame so on his wife’s orders, he has Castle’s entire family massacred. And I mean his whole family. Aunties. Third cousins. Weird Uncle Greg. The whole bunch.
The Punisher really leans into cop movie cliches. It’s particularly enamored of the hoary old chestnut of the veteran looking forward to an impossibly perfect, idyllic retirement with a cockiness that dooms their beautiful dreams to a violent and inevitable demise.
It’s equally fond of the cliche where a family man’s family is taken from him in a manner that makes it impossible for him to ever assimilate back into polite society and relegates him to a lonely, haunted existence.
In this case that mean Castle preposterously has a big “Hey, I successfully faked my death so let’s bring together the entire family, mom and dad included, in a particularly unprotected part of paradise so they can all be targets in the same place at the same time” party that unsurprisingly leads to the brutal assassination of Castle’s family, including his wife and son in a set-piece that lingers sadistically, taking unseemly delight in the obliteration of everything our hero values in the world, including a father played by Roy Scheider, one of a number of heavy hitters in a surprisingly over-stuffed cast.
The goons seemingly kill Castle, at least twice but like Steven Seagal in the motion picture Hard to Kill Frank Castle is hard to kill. So he survives the massacre with one goal in life: to avenge his family’s murder, to “punish” the criminals responsible by killing them all in exceedingly violent, personal ways.
The suddenly solitary Castle moves to a lonely apartment with incongruously wacky sitcom comic relief next door neighbors played by plus-sized funnyman John Pinette, Ben Foster as a heavily pierced tweaker with a heart of gold and Rebecca Romijn as a woman who has been hurt by men and by life but has enough faith in humanity left to fall for Frank in all his hunky brokenness.
The Punisher is all about overkill. Frank himself is murdered a whole bunch of times all at once but does not die. Howard Saint similarly makes a point of massacring as broad a circle of folks as possible.
The Punisher is a weird fucking movie with a bunch of shit that very aggressively does not work, like a deeply regrettable subplot involving Frank Castle blackmailing a gay henchman played by Gone in 60 Seconds’ Will Patton into doing his bidding by threatening to reveal his homosexuality to Travolta’s Howard Priest, his boss and best friend.
Though the vigilante in black and the familia-crazed kingpin have parallel arcs that involve vendettas inspired by the murder of family members, it sometimes feels like Travolta and Jane are in different movies.
Like the movie itself, Travolta’s performance is all over the place in a way that’s both fascinating and frustrating. Travolta is alternately deliciously over-the-top in his scenery-devouring theatricality and surprisingly restrained.
He’s at once a madman who isn’t above killing people himself or executing multiple loved ones over a single unfortunate misunderstanding and a cold-blooded moneyman who tries to separate his white-hot emotions from his business and fails spectacularly every time.
It’s as if Travolta is in a weird art movie about a mobster with a psychotic obsession with his wife and sons and Jane is in a Punisher movie and the two films only occasionally overlap and intersect.
I dug how wildly The Punisher deviates from the sturdy but safe blueprint of the MCU, how it feels lopsided and vulgar and pulpy but also alive with energy and oddball ideas and dark comedy. I similarly appreciated that whenever Jane’s Punisher isn’t killing people he’s eating or drinking hard liquor.
Killing all those people with such delight has to take a lot out of a guy physically. I can’t even imagine how hungry I’d be if I killed a broad cross section of Florida’s scuzziest henchmen and the booze helps with the pain but can never kill the memories entirely.
I prefer Punisher: War Zone’s vision of The Punisher as a feral beast over this film’s half wacky, half tragic conception of Frank Castle as the ultimate vigilante but also Bugs Bunny but I’ve got to say I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging I found this.
I don’t know if The Punisher is good but there’s a lot in it that has stuck with me, like the comically over-sized pipes Travolta’s bad guy smokes over the course of the film and his character’s appropriately out-sized death-by-Punishing. This may be schlock but it’s schlock executed with pulpy panache.
The Punisher at least deserves credit for being somewhat different, which in the superhero genre is as rare as it is appreciated.
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