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Dr. Hurt posted:When you really get down to it though, does the Punisher need a movie to explain his origin? He's the Punisher, he Punishes people. I think you could make a cerebral movie that involves what psychologically pushes the Punisher, while keeping the violence up to Punisher Max levels. Yes, you do. We may all know his origin and have seen it done over and over again, but the general public who doesn't know who or what a "Punisher" is should be given the origin. Also, what pisses me off most about War Zone is that the War Journal script that was the follow up to the Jane movie never got made. It had some of the same elements that later went into War Zone (the old Don's birthday party, Jigsaw being a combination of Jigsaw and Nicky Cavella, Pitsy and Ink, etc) but did them in a serious, brutal, much more true to the source material way. It also had the subplot of the Punisher copycats from Welcome Back, Frank, reduced down to just The Holy, which would have been loving awesome.
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Feb 11, 2011 08:34
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Dr. Hurt posted:When you really get down to it though, does the Punisher need a movie to explain his origin? He's the Punisher, he Punishes people. I think you could make a cerebral movie that involves what psychologically pushes the Punisher, while keeping the violence up to Punisher Max levels. It doesn't even explain what he does, it takes the character's actions in a new and kinda more interesting direction. The director said straight out "I didn't want him to just kill people. That's not punishment. That's execution. So I had him actually punish Saint, by making him turn his own life into a hell." That's loving cool. That's punishment. "I made you kill your wife. I made you kill your best friend. And now, I'm going to kill you."
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Feb 11, 2011 15:00
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Dickeye posted:It doesn't even explain what he does, it takes the character's actions in a new and kinda more interesting direction. You forgot the best part of that moment, which is immediately before it where Saint yells "You killed me son!" and then we hear a scream and explosion from inside the office and Frank's reply is simply "Both of them."
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Feb 11, 2011 15:12
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TheJoker138 posted:Yes, you do. We may all know his origin and have seen it done over and over again, but the general public who doesn't know who or what a "Punisher" is should be given the origin. Also, what pisses me off most about War Zone is that the War Journal script that was the follow up to the Jane movie never got made. It had some of the same elements that later went into War Zone (the old Don's birthday party, Jigsaw being a combination of Jigsaw and Nicky Cavella, Pitsy and Ink, etc) but did them in a serious, brutal, much more true to the source material way. It also had the subplot of the Punisher copycats from Welcome Back, Frank, reduced down to just The Holy, which would have been loving awesome. Jane deserved another go-around as the Punisher. The Punisher film with him in it was a tad too long (and a bit bizarre: his WHOLE family? Really??) but the action more than makes up for it. But I cannot hate Punisher War Zone. I simply can't. It's over the top, it's not as nasty as it could have been, and Jigsaw's revamped origin is a bit too neat (so his face is destroyed, but the rest of him isn't?), but it's still good cheesy fun. Plus Wayne Knight as Microchip was something that just needed to be done.
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Feb 11, 2011 15:24
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Microchip in a movie is not something that ever needed to be done, regardless of the actor. The one scene I'll give credit to is the one with Jigsaw making his huge speech in front of the flag. If the rest of the movie had been that insane, it would have at least been entertaining in a Crank kind of way. As it is, it's just out of place though.
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Feb 11, 2011 15:44
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TheJoker138 posted:You forgot the best part of that moment, which is immediately before it where Saint yells "You killed me son!" and then we hear a scream and explosion from inside the office and Frank's reply is simply "Both of them."
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Feb 11, 2011 15:57
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redbackground posted:That was the only good part. War Zone is easily the more entertaining film, high fives to Trollologist all around. I love Tom Jane and all, but give me more Ray Stevenson as Frank and more missile launchers fired at jerks. So, so many bad guys got shot the hell up in that movie, it was right out of MAX. If all you've gotten from MAX is "he kills a bunch of dudes!" I don't know what to say.
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Feb 11, 2011 16:01
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TheJoker138 posted:Microchip in a movie is not something that ever needed to be done, regardless of the actor. I think you'd need Micro in a movie, just to explain a few things to the audience. How does Frank get his intel? Micro sets him up with surveillance equipment. How does he get his safehouses? Micro launders the money to pay for them. How does a wanted man get access to such exotic firepower? Micro arranges procurement. And so on. War Zone was a goddamn laugh riot, if you didn't take it seriously. I was disappointed the first time I watched it; the second time, it seemed so absurd and over-the-top that I couldn't stop smiling. Punisher's such a simple character, I dunno why they can't translate him to the big screen. It's not even like they'd have to spend a fuckton of cash on CGI, to imitate superpowers -- it's just a dude with some guns killing motherfuckers in dramatic ways. Give me 2.5 hours of Frank hitting mobsters, escaping, planning his next hit - tons of action, all connected with a decent plot - and I think I'd be glued to my seat. No redemption, no "woe is me" character development, no love interest -- just a messed-up war veteran going all-out against mobsters because gently caress it, he's got nothing left to lose. Poor Thomas Jane, I think he would've made a great Punisher. Aaron really knows how to write a cliffhanger. His arcs have kept me guessing and I'm curious about what happens next. picosecond fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Feb 11, 2011 |
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Feb 11, 2011 16:14
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TheJoker138 posted:If all you've gotten from MAX is "he kills a bunch of dudes!" I don't know what to say.
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Feb 11, 2011 16:24
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I think the character would work much better in a TV series than in a movie, to tell you the truth. Imagine something akin to the current Walking Dead series, just adapting Ennis' MAX stories, on HBO or Showtime.
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Feb 11, 2011 16:25
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TheJoker138 posted:I think the character would work much better in a TV series than in a movie, to tell you the truth. Imagine something akin to the current Walking Dead series, just adapting Ennis' MAX stories, on HBO or Showtime. I was thinking the other day that a Punisher show would work well as a kind of period piece. The first season is his first year or two as the Punisher, then he's caught & goes to jail. The second season, he breaks out, resumes his war, hooks up with some Vietnam buddies to help him out. Third season, he finally gets the mobsters that killed his family & he has to decide if he should keep Punishing... You get the idea. We'd follow his "career" from start (which would be, I guess, the early 80s) to now, watch him age & see how he adjusts his operation to compensate, watch friends and allies come & go. Done right I think it'd be some compelling TV.
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Feb 11, 2011 16:32
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TheJoker138 posted:Microchip in a movie is not something that ever needed to be done, regardless of the actor. You don't think War Zone is over the top? The whole thing is insane. The rocket hitting the guy in mid-jump wasn't nuts? Nothing can be as insane as the Crank series, but certainly you don't think this movie was made to be completely serious.
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Feb 11, 2011 17:05
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:You don't think War Zone is over the top? The whole thing is insane. The rocket hitting the guy in mid-jump wasn't nuts? Nothing can be as insane as the Crank series, but certainly you don't think this movie was made to be completely serious. They mixed too much serious crap in it that I got the impression it had no idea what it wanted to be. Sure you had the over the top action, but then they mixed it with stuff like Frank being super sad about killing the undercover cop and all that bullshit. Also they made a movie with Soap in it, and Soap wasn't played by Judge Reinhold, so they can automatically gently caress off.
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Feb 11, 2011 17:17
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TheJoker138 posted:If all you've gotten from MAX is "he kills a bunch of dudes!" I don't know what to say. Look man, The Punisher didn't start out as a tragic figure who kills criminals so he can feel some twisted sense of redemption for the one time he failed to protect them. He started out as some Joker in a Skull shirt who tried to kill Spider-Man What I'm saying is that unlike most heroes, The Punisher's origin pretty much just serves as a motive and not much else we don't need half a move about how great his family is before every family member of his is gunned down. But I do with Joker138 on two points: 1) The Punisher would be better served as a series on HBO or Showtime, The MAX stories would serve as perfect episode arcs. and 2) War Zone was to comicy to be a serious action film, and to gritty to be an over the top comic action film. (I still love it though)
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Feb 11, 2011 17:30
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:You don't think War Zone is over the top? The whole thing is insane. The rocket hitting the guy in mid-jump wasn't nuts? Nothing can be as insane as the Crank series, but certainly you don't think this movie was made to be completely serious. After they do Ghost Rider 2, Neveldine and Taylor need to do Punisher. TheJoker138 posted:They mixed too much serious crap in it that I got the impression it had no idea what it wanted to be. Sure you had the over the top action, but then they mixed it with stuff like Frank being super sad about killing the undercover cop and all that bullshit. Bonus points if all his lines were just thinly veiled rewrites of his lines in Beverly Hills Cop.
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Feb 11, 2011 17:30
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Dickeye posted:After they do Ghost Rider 2, Neveldine and Taylor need to do Punisher. Neveldine and Taylor on the Punisher would be amazing. Jason Statham would have to play someone in it. Not Frank, but maybe a villain. And yes, Reinhold was such obvious loving casting for Soap that it pisses me off that they got some guy to play him instead. It's not like Reinhold is expensive or busy, for gods sake.
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Feb 11, 2011 17:48
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TheJoker138 posted:I think the character would work much better in a TV series than in a movie, to tell you the truth. Imagine something akin to the current Walking Dead series, just adapting Ennis' MAX stories, on HBO or Showtime. I think that's a terrible idea, actually. Nobody would want to watch a weekly series that was so relentlessly grim.
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Feb 11, 2011 18:56
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I think that's a terrible idea, actually. Nobody would want to watch a weekly series that was so relentlessly grim. I counter you with Battlestar Galactica. I don't know if the ratings were ever that good, but it was very grim and ran for a long time. I also want to add that War Zone was a hideous disaster of a film. I thought it was up there with Ang Lee's Hulk in terms of being an ugly visual mess. I found it difficult to look at.
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Feb 11, 2011 19:14
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The Action Man posted:I counter you with Battlestar Galactica. I don't know if the ratings were ever that good, but it was very grim and ran for a long time. It also got hosed with, hard, by the network because of how grim it was. Pretty much all of season 3 was non-serialized episodes that tried to tone down the gloom and doom, because Sci-Fi was hounding them about it.
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Feb 11, 2011 19:46
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It also got hosed with, hard, by the network because of how grim it was. Pretty much all of season 3 was non-serialized episodes that tried to tone down the gloom and doom, because Sci-Fi was hounding them about it. All you need to lighten up a Punisher tv show is to include more Barracuda. "Just let me pull a complaint form out the enda my dick."
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Feb 11, 2011 19:48
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Mix it up with some of the Marvel Knights run to make it a bit less grim then. Stuff like The Russian and Frank punching a polar bear square in the face would lighten the mood in between stuff like The Slavers and Up Is Down And Black Is White.
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Feb 11, 2011 20:18
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There wouldn't be enough of a budget to do the best Max runs. The Widows, Nicky Cavella and that terrible cop arc would be the only really cheap ones. In The Beginning, Mother Russia, Man of Stone and Barracuda 1 would break the bank in a major way. Punisher War Zone is better than Jane Punisher based on the "You're Under Arrest" Shotgun blast to the face part and the parkour-seeking missile. Also killing Microchip was pretty ballsy, how many other movies with stand-offs end with a main character getting shot in the face because the protagonist makes a choice to let them die to save someone else. And while Tom Jane was smacking people in the face with a butterfly knife for comic relief Ray Stevenson was mercy killing his associates with a Smith & Wesson .500. There would be nothing of Carlos left after that
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Feb 11, 2011 23:37
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There would of course have to be adaptation done to a lot of the MAX stories to make them work on a TV budget, and stuff like Mother Russia wouldn't work at all, yeah. But you could take the basic concepts behind stuff like the Barracuda arc and still do something effective, if not 100% accurate.
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Feb 12, 2011 00:21
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I think that's a terrible idea, actually. Nobody would want to watch a weekly series that was so relentlessly grim. To play devil's advocate, even Punisher MAX is less grim than The Wire.
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Feb 12, 2011 01:21
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Mavel Knights Punisher in modified Max plots would probably be the most R-rated television friendly. Frank has a really dry sense of humour in that series which has had a bit of a resurgence in the new PunisherMax series. While I would love to see the serious, all business approach to the character of Ennis' Max run it's hard to imagine it capturing enough viewers.
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Feb 12, 2011 01:35
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RevBabyKiller posted:Punisher War Zone is better than Jane Punisher based on the "You're Under Arrest" Shotgun blast to the face part and the parkour-seeking missile. Also killing Microchip was pretty ballsy, how many other movies with stand-offs end with a main character getting shot in the face because the protagonist makes a choice to let them die to save someone else. And while Tom Jane was smacking people in the face with a butterfly knife for comic relief Ray Stevenson was mercy killing his associates with a Smith & Wesson .500. There would be nothing of Carlos left after that The creators of War Zone understood how dark, menacing, and bad rear end the Punisher had to be. What they didn't know was cinematography, screen writing, editing, lighting, and action choreography. They wanted to make a good, dark Punisher film, but they lacked the talent to make a good film about anything, let alone the Punisher.
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Feb 12, 2011 01:40
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The Action Man posted:What they didn't know was cinematography, editing, lighting, and action choreography. They wanted to make a good, dark Punisher film, but they lacked the talent to make a good film about anything, let alone the Punisher. Of all the things to complain about in the movie I think the cinematography, set design and lighting were perfect for a live-action comic feel. Sure it didn't have the gritty realism of the Jane Punisher but if it had been played straight with dark sets and disposed of all of the ambient lighting I think it would have been a more generic and boring movie. The problems with War Zone were budgetary and script based. Ray Stevenson was incredible, the bomb-suit was epic, and the attention to detail in the combat drills was stellar (minus the chandelier and other stupid moments). That they had him twitch his jaw to pop his ears in order to reinstate proper hearing after the incredible noisy shoot-out warmed my tiny heart War Zone featured a humongous dude in a modified bomb disposal suit walking the streets and blasting people with the largest handgun available (modified for more power). It shared more in common with Batman/Batman Returns than newer "realistic" takes on superheroes and I enjoyed the hell out of it. With twice the budget for special effects and script revisions it could have been something incredible
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Feb 12, 2011 02:29
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I thought his costume in War Zone looked awful. And the lighting was also terrible. The neon everywhere, jesus.
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Feb 12, 2011 02:51
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RevBabyKiller posted:Of all the things to complain about in the movie I think the cinematography, set design and lighting were perfect for a live-action comic feel. Sure it didn't have the gritty realism of the Jane Punisher but if it had been played straight with dark sets and disposed of all of the ambient lighting I think it would have been a more generic and boring movie. The problems with War Zone were budgetary and script based. Ray Stevenson was incredible, the bomb-suit was epic, and the attention to detail in the combat drills was stellar (minus the chandelier and other stupid moments). That they had him twitch his jaw to pop his ears in order to reinstate proper hearing after the incredible noisy shoot-out warmed my tiny heart I'm still not convinced about the visual aspect of the film, but I do agree that the script needed work. Stevenson was a great fit for Frank, and it's a shame he got saddled with such a bad script.
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Feb 12, 2011 02:59
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I would pay good money to read an ongoing MAX Punisher where he DID get to kill off the supervillains of the Marvel universe. Just make it an alternate Ennis-verse or something and go wild. I'd say there's enough material there for a good few years, having the villains actually DIE and have the resulting fallout from both hero/villain communities. Could lead to interesting deconstructions of the usual cape conventions.
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Feb 12, 2011 12:46
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Mister Roboto posted:I would pay good money to read an ongoing MAX Punisher where he DID get to kill off the supervillains of the Marvel universe. Just make it an alternate Ennis-verse or something and go wild. This seems to be what the current MAX series is. If Bullseye makes it out of this arc alive I'll be shocked.
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Feb 12, 2011 13:10
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TheJoker138 posted:This seems to be what the current MAX series is. If Bullseye makes it out of this arc alive I'll be shocked. They've toned the "super" part way down, he's just a really awesome assassin. And I like that the current series is really Frank and Fisk squaring off, much better than the nebulous "well the generals" big bad.
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Feb 12, 2011 15:13
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Dickeye posted:They've toned the "super" part way down, he's just a really awesome assassin. I also like Kingpin much more than the Generals, but Aaron and Ennis have very different intentions with their respective villains. Aaron's Kingpin is supposed to be the final boss at the end of the video game; he's big, tough, and awesome in his own right. He's also a much more well rounded character than the generals. Wilson has shared a lot with the reader about his past, family, and the sacrifices he's made to be where he is today. Ennis' Generals were supposed to be bureaucrats that played with peoples' lives. They weren't characters so much as stand ins for the part of the military industrial complex that feeds human lives into a meat grinder hoping to turn out a financial or political profit. They're the brains of the military machine that created government backed monsters like Barracuda and Rawlins. Aaron's Fisk is a character with his own story in PunisherMax; Ennis' Generals are examples of a theme running through his Punisher stories.
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Feb 12, 2011 17:54
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:To play devil's advocate, even Punisher MAX is less grim than The Wire. The Wire has a ton of humor in it, not to mention it's an ensemble cast full of people with aspirations and hopes that run into hosed up situations and corrupt institutions. The Punisher is about a guy with a single-minded goal to murder people even more unsavory than himself. You can't really compare the two, no matter how much I absolutely love Ennis' Punisher MAX, I don't think I could tolerate more than a miniseries of that kind of thing.
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Feb 12, 2011 19:46
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Mister Roboto posted:I would pay good money to read an ongoing MAX Punisher where he DID get to kill off the supervillains of the Marvel universe. Just make it an alternate Ennis-verse or something and go wild. Just read "The Boys".
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Feb 13, 2011 22:17
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Whargoul posted:Just read "The Boys".
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Feb 13, 2011 23:09
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Whargoul posted:Just read "The Boys". I am, first three trades done. Good stuff, albeit so, so, SO bitter in its writing.
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Feb 13, 2011 23:10
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Punisher is the only Marvel book I read regularly, so I must step in and spreg about poo poo. Punisher War Zone (the film) was appropriately violent but otherwise a big stupid mess with a very stupid script. Who would take a kid who's being hunted by the mob to go play and run around in A New York subway tunnel, really? Oh I know, the poo poo-stupid characters in that film. That and Maginty's dialoge was enough to push that film from being just cheesy and ugly to  levels of stupid. That actor sounded like an Australian with a brain injury, not an Irishman. There are more flaws to go on about, but those define the film for me. Wayne Knight was the only thing I liked about War Zone, mostly because in my mind, he was still playing Newman.As for the comics, I'm in agreement with everyone who likes the Max books. They just fit the character, and thier quality has been consistantly high.
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Feb 14, 2011 14:28
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I really, really liked War Zone. I came to watch Frank kill people in brutal fashion, was not disappointed. A lot of people don't understand how someone could like war zone versus the Tom Jane punisher, but I'm the exact opposite. Oh yes, the punisher shirt is an ancient voodoo symbol, yeah whatever. I thought the Tom Jane was really dumb in all the wrong ways, I thought. But most people disagree with me and I accept this. However, when I try to get friends to read the MAX books I always introduce them as "the best movies never made." They should get Zack "I just make comic book panels move" Snyder to make them into a mini series. The first ten Ennis books would be perfect for this.
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Feb 15, 2011 00:45
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I liked War Zone because it felt like a hosed up sequel to Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy movie.
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Feb 15, 2011 02:44
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