Back in the late 1980s, the Australia R rating used to mean something. Where action films were concerned, it often meant quality, or at least that the director and studio were going out of their way to please the hardcore audience that sought out action films. In this day and age, where studios like Fox are throwing hundreds of millions behind films that try to please everyone and, as a result, please no one, one must bemoan the fact that nobody makes films like The Punisher anymore.
Okay, it’s a well-established fact that this adaptation of The Punisher is not very faithful to its source material. There are adaptations that get worse the more they diss their source material, the recent Lord Of The Rings trilogy being a classic example. The Punisher, however, is not one of them. This incarnation of The Punisher delivers wall-to-wall carnage, and was created with the specific goal of doing so. The total bodycount numbers well over a hundred, making it legend in comparison to the so-called action films of today that hover in the two-digit nowhere land.
Dolph Lundgren was an excellent choice to play the titular character, in contrast to Thomas Jane. Where Jane just doesn’t carry himself like a superhero given invincibility by the loss of all hope, Lundgren’s massive swagger and dialogue economy make him far more convincing. The fact that he also looks like the kind of man half a dozen muggers wouldn’t want to meet at once also helps. Of course, as Universal Soldier demonstrated, a problem exists when one casts Lundgren in a starring role. Namely that of ensuring that the rest of the cast is not utterly Dwarfed by him in comparison.
No visual explanation of the character is offered in this film. The Punisher starts off by simply killing a target, and from then on, the mayhem doesn’t let up. The exposition sequences are only offered when absolutely necessary, and they stick to the point. During the film’s ninety-odd minutes, I counted maybe ten to fifteen minutes of speech, and most of that was merely startup for more violence. Films in general were consistently better before the MPAA decided everything had to be suitable only for four-year-olds, and this especially applies to action films.
The problem with the 1989 production of The Punisher was that it was done very cheaply. The negatives, the set designs, the props, and even the support cast, scream low-rent at the top of their proverbial lungs. Dolph Lundgren, Louis Gossett junior, and Jeroen Krabbé aside, the whole cast is so no-name that one has to wonder if the studio even bothered to contact the screen actors’ guild. The Japanese actors in particular take overacting to a height not witnessed since the heady days of early television. It could not be more obvious that the studio who paid for this film to be made were an independent, low-yield concern that simply didn’t have the cash to finance what people generally expect from an adaptation of a big-name comic.
