Punisher Review – Click click bang bang

The meat of the story, for me, was in the moments where we watched how the events in Kandahar affected each of the show’s characters, and how war changed them.

Consider Frank’s war buddy Curtis, who runs a veterans’ support group. A former medic retired after losing a leg in an explosion, he spends his evenings trying to help those scarred even worse than he is deal with life after the military. The moments that stem from this remind me of some of the best moments from movies like 1982’s First Blood, the original Rambo movie.

Seeing Frank through Curtis’ eyes is to see a man stuck in a hole, unwilling to do anything other than keep digging even when helping hands are being offered to pull him out. It gives a different and much-needed view of Frank that helps paint him as something other than a soldier with anger-fueled superpowers.

That also reunites Frank with Billy Russo (Ben Barnes, Westworld). Old-school Punisher fans will recognize him as the mob hitman “Billy the Beaut” who later becomes one of the Punisher’s recurring villains. In the series, though, he’s one of Frank’s war buddies. Where we see other vets struggling, Billy is wildly successful as the owner of a private military company. Family money and natural good looks (he’s still a Beaut) helped him land on his feet after the horrors of war. His good looks and winning smile make him easy to like, but also hard to trust. And he’s scarred by war, too — just on the inside, not the outside. He’s left his humanity behind in ways that Frank and Curtis have to find out about the hard way.

It was strange to see Russo turned into an ex-military character, but in the context of 2017’s Punisher, it works. The mob isn’t the headline-making force it was in the 1970s and 1980s, and nothing about this show would let the mob make an elegant entrance. Instead, making him ex-military and an old friend of Frank’s makes his shift away from the light a more painful and meaningful one than we would have for a simple mob assassin.

Another key veteran character is Lewis Walcott, a man suffering from dangerously-bad PTSD. Where Curtis copes with his combat experience through community service, Walcott feels completely deserted by the system he helped protect. He finds himself attracted to fringe elements that see things like gun control as stripping away of personal freedoms, and such things to stoke his sense of isolation from society. Where Castle wallows, Walcott stews.

Here, Castle does what he does best as a character: he serves as a mirror for another character. Castle blames himself for everything, and Walcott blames everyone but himself. Walcott isolates himself, while Castle begrudgingly makes connections to the world through characters like recurring Marvel character Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll, Daredevil), through Curtis, and even through Micro and his family, who we’ll get into in a bit.

Frank is still an unhealthy character, but the contrasts created with him show how our connections humanize us.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/punisher-netflix-review/