In bringing Marvel’s indomitable vigilante The Punisher to the big screen, writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh has created a gritty, muscular action thriller that is unlike any other film in the comic book genre. The story of a complicated hero who has no choice but to take on those who have committed egregious wrongs, The Punisher is classical action storytelling at its most exciting and intense. Its hero, Frank Castle, has no superhuman abilities, but his years of combat experience and expertise with conventional and exotic weapons render him an army unto himself – known as The Punisher. Making his directorial debut, Hensleigh marries a tightly constructed narrative to the lean-and-mean naturalism of seminal 1960s and 70s action pictures; the result is a film as commanding and smart as its hero. The Punisher is top-flight entertainment, yet it doesn’t stop there; as a narrative of revenge and redemption, it is a story that speaks to these volatile times. Background
Marvel Comics first introduced Frank Castle, the vigilante known as The Punisher, in February 1974, as a supporting character in The Amazing Spider-Man. Castle arrived in a popular culture that had responded strongly to loner anti-heroes like Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle (The French Connection) and Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force), cops who confronted urban crime on their own unsparing terms. July 1974 – five months after The Punisher’s debut – saw the premiere of the controversial Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson as a New York architect turned vigilante. Comments Marvel Studios CEO and producer Avi Arad, “Like movies, comics are reflective of the time in which they are being published. The Punisher is a byproduct of 70’s anxieties about crime and social breakdown.”
From the beginning, The Punisher stood out in the Marvel universe as a different kind of superhero. He had no supernatural gifts. His skills - whether hand-to-hand combat, weapons mastery, or battlefield strategizing - were strictly organic. The Punisher was flesh and blood, like his readers. He proved so popular that he was given his own series, and by 1990 was starring in as many as three titles a month. In recent years, the franchise has reinvented itself with a series of sharply written, evocatively illustrated books by writer Garth Ennis and illustrator Steve Dillon, whose titles include Welcome Back Frank series. In 2000, The Punisher re-emerged as one Marvel’s top-selling solo books and remains a top seller for the company.
Recent years have seen the overwhelming success of films based on Marvel Comic characters, including X-Men and X2: X-Men United, Spider-Man, Daredevil and The Hulk. Inasmuch as the character of the Punisher is not the typical Marvel superhero, the company felt a film version of The Punisher would also have to forge its own distinct path. Says Marvel’s Ari Arad, the film’s co-producer, “The Punisher is gritty and real, and we wanted to make a movie that reflected that.”
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