The Punisher review: Its own worst enemy

Netflix’s line of Marvel shows is by now so disconnected from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we may as well call it the Marvel Netflix Universe, and its latest installment is perhaps the most divorced from the MCU yet.

But The Punisher is already an odd one out in the Defenders setting — it’s the first of its line to not have been a part of initial planning for the streaming service’s Marvel offerings, the first to not have been built on a road that led to The Defenders. It’s also about a character who is an odd one out even in comics; his anti-hero ethos existing explicitly to contrast the superheroic black and white morality of the majority of Marvel’s superheroes. The Punisher isn’t a superhero, but a reflection of them.

Reviewing Netflix’s Marvel shows before release always comes with some risk, as the company only offers the first half of the season to press. Still, it seems fair to judge a show based on those episodes alone, and update once the rest become available. But here, again, The Punisher feels like a different beast. (Update: The full review is below.)

The Punisher has a small array of subplots, some of which are wrestling with incredibly weighty issues, like the grooming of young, dissatisfied men into political tools and the care (or lack thereof) the system gives to the mental health of veterans. With some of these elements, it’s unclear how they are going to (presumably) connect back to the show’s main plot.

How well the Punisher writers’ room has crafted those eventual connections and conclusions will make or break a lot of the show. So consider this our Punisher pre-review. And, so far, The Punisher might not be exactly what you’re expecting.

Nicole Rivelli/Netflix

The Punisher: The First Six Episodes

Frank Castle’s classic image — a white guy with lots of guns who typically fires many of them into other people — has given his series an uncertain appeal in, shall we say, our current environment of current events. Star Jon Bernthal has talked about the show’s uncomfortable relatability in interviews. Netflix has even canceled a major appearance of the Punisher cast at New York Comic Con in October, in deference to the Las Vegas mass shooting in which 58 people died and 546 were wounded, and delayed the release of the show. (In the intervening weeks, 26 churchgoers were killed by a single shooter in a small town in Texas.)

And The Punisher is certainly about a lone gunman — but in its first six episodes it’s much more about America’s intelligence ecosystem in the era of the War on Terror, and the lives of soldiers once they return to our shores. What I remember most from those episodes isn’t the blowout fights or the car chases, it’s the spycraft and intrigue of trained intelligence professionals who can’t afford to trust anyone figuring out how to work together toward common goals, and the clever positioning of Frank Castle and a government agent as opposing figures investigating the same corruption.

The Punisher’s first episode is sleepy and repetitive; nothing in it is anything we didn’t see in the second season of Daredevil. Along those same lines, The fifth and sixth episodes already drag more than the others, an indication of the usual mid-season Netflix slump. But at least Punisher’s repetitive beginning is part of the first narratively necessary step in the show’s plot: moving the goalpost on Frank’s revenge.

Jessica Miglio/Netflix

Yes, The Punisher is our second story about Frank Castle taking revenge on the people who destroyed his family, but it obeys the canonical law of the sequel: If you’re going to have the same plot, at least make it bigger and more complicated. To that end, the show fills out Frank’s supporting cast with some real character gems.

As in his comic book incarnation, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Micro becomes Frank’s new partner, or, in the immortal words of Spider-Man: Homecoming, his “guy in the chair.” We’re introduced to a whole host of Frank’s old army buddies, only some of whom are aware that he’s still alive. But my favorite of the bunch is Amber Rose Revah’s Dinah Madani, a welcome twist on the usual trope of the good cop in a corrupt system who wants the same thing as the anti-hero, but could never work with them — unless, of course, desperate circumstances might force them to. (Consider my fingers crossed.)

Nicole Rivelli/Netflix

Madani is practically our second lead; she’s given loads of time in the plot to explore her history as an upwardly mobile, female, first-generation Iranian-American Department of Homeland Security agent. And Punisher puts Madani and Frank Castle on a collision course (at one point, literally), as they both charge after the same conspiracy from within and without the system in which it secretly flourished.

Charging after that conspiracy is the main plot of the show and is where it does its best work. The tensest moments for me were all about Micro trying his best to impress a highly paranoid and extremely dangerous Frank Castle — and also gain his trust at the same time. The ways in which Micro and Frank wrestle for leverage over each other even after they recognize their shared goals is just as engaging as Madani’s struggle for recognition in the DoHS. In comparison, the drawn out firefights, bloody commando flashbacks and soft-focus remembrances of Frank’s family bored me.

However, the focus on the Department of Homeland Security — as well as scenes within the CIA and the flashbacks to Frank’s military career — bring one of the show’s strangest choices to the fore. The Punisher makes the frankly unbelievable presumption that, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the history of the War on Terror as well as the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security have undergone no especially notable divergences from our own reality.

It’s not a show-breaking detail, but it does seem like a missed opportunity. The Punisher has the fewest connections to the Marvel Universe in a group of shows that were billed on their interconnected setting and have since notably ignored that they’re in the same world as Iron Man, War Machine and Captain America. In the first six episodes, superheroes have been mentioned once, and then only in a sentence that wouldn’t be out of place for a show where they only existed in comic books.

Nicole Rivelli/Netflix

The Punisher also has a habit — not a unique one, by any means — of setting up characters who are obvious in their intolerance so that their leads can swat them down, a lazy way of establishing their bonafides as Not That Kind of Guy. Creating an unsubtle caricature of a racist for your hero to oppose with a quip does not actually contribute to the conversation around Islamophobia in post-9/11 American culture, nor properly depict the nuances of the issue you’re trying to address.

And how The Punisher approaches its nuances in the last half its season will have a big impact on its overall quality. If Frank’s unit was part of a military conspiracy without his knowledge, is the show trying to absolve him of or implicate him in its misdeeds? This other veteran character, struggling to connect, violently lashing out and looking for another fight to join — will he eventually represent a “realistic” version of Frank Castle’s story? Or does he represent the kind of uncontrolled violence that Frank channels so carefully and deliberately at criminals?

These are the questions the last half of The Punisher has to answer, and I’m curious to see how it does.

Update: The Full Season

My biggest concern, coming out of episode six of The Punisher, was that it would make a serious misstep in its attempt to address gun violence and mass killings in America. In the end, the subplot stood on its own sturdy legs without much fuss — but without really taking a stand, you might say.

While it’s admirable that The Punisher acknowledges the parallels between the behavior that we’re all tuning in to see Frank Castle commit — bloody, gun-fueled, extra-judicial revenge — and America’s seemingly ever-present incidents of mass shootings, the show goes no farther than that. Punisher stays dedicatedly neutral on what the solution to lone-gunman mass violence in America should be, by creating character stand-ins for both the guns rights and gun control side of our national debate and then depicting them both as hypocritical, lying, cowardly stereotypes.

Without a broader, braver message on the subject, the acknowledgment of the fact that Frank’s personal quest for revenge can be so easily conflated with an anti-government, pro-guns bombing campaign enacted on innocents undercuts the heroic vigilante ideal. Frank is a fantasy. Bringing him this close to reality takes all the wind out of him.

But then, in its totality, The Punisher already feels like something that’s had the wind taken out of it. It feels like too little plot stretched over too many episodes, a tight action movie with a dollop of spycraft that was pulled like taffy until it was thirteen hours long. But maybe it’s just that it’s hard to keep a sense of rising stakes in a show where the lead fundamentally doesn’t care if he lives or dies throughout the entire climax — and very few other characters do either.

Photo: Nicole Rivelli/Netflix

The main narrative thrust of The Punisher actually ends an episode before the show does, leaving the audience to drag on another hour through an unnecessary extension of Frank’s revenge quest. And by this point The Punisher has undercut itself in other ways as well, by slowly exposing its villains as near cartoonishly evil, complete with crazed laughter, walking-away-slowly-from-an-explosion and one-weird-dead-eye.

Then, without giving anything away, the resolution of the climax manages to both feel out of character for Frank (in a way I expect many Punisher fans will find alienating) and implausibly favorable to him. This is Punisher’s second biggest problem after how slow it moves: that it wants to be a show about the real experiences of veterans and terrorist, political mass violence in America today and it wants to be a show about Frank Castle putting a skull on his chest and surviving a near-death beating from a cackling secret agent.

The Punisher’s tone and pacing problems ultimately overwhelmed any goodwill I had towards Frank and Micro and Agent Madani from the outset. A late-season brush with a Rashomon-style episode was only a brief breather from an otherwise dull experience. The Punisher didn’t having me rolling my eyes at its dialogue, as I have with the worst of Marvel’s Netflix fare, but its attempts to tackle weighty real-world tensions undercuts its attempts to be a bullet-filled revenge fantasy. And its hesitance to follow through on its real-world elements and take a stand leave it feeling like a bridge with no middle; two opposed poles with just the wind between them.