The Punisher - Extended Cut (2004)

The Punisher is an adaptation of the iconic Marvel antihero. I will start by mentioning that I may be in the minority of the people who actually like this film, but I will stand by my opinion. In fact, I would argue this to be an underrated film.

The story opens with a police sting operation as an undercover Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) fakes his own death and exposes an illegal weapons deal, resulting in the death of Bobby Saint, son of Howard Saint, a dangerous mob boss (played by John Travolta). It’s actually surprising how not over-the-top John Travolta plays his character. I’ll admit that when I first saw this I assumed he’d chew through the scenery like he was teething, but to my surprise, he's a bit low key. He plays Howard Saint as both paranoid and insecure with a slight touch of eloquence. After his son dies, he rapidly begins his own investigation and manages to find out who the undercover cop was. Meanwhile, retired Frank Castle and his family are having a family reunion in Puerto Rico before they are relocated. It's here that his family, and in this version of the origin it’s every single member, is killed by Howard’s assassins led by Quentin Glass (Will Patton). To the credit of the villains, they go to pretty great lengths to make sure Castle’s dead; they beat the hell out of him, shoot him point-blank in the chest, and blow him up. He miraculously survives and thus begins his new purpose in life: punishing the criminals that slaughtered his family.

There are several ways that a character like this could have been interpreted on the screen. The obvious way, and it's the interpretation used for more recent The Punisher: War Zone, is to go really over-the-top with the violence and action, more closely resembling the cheesy action films of the 70s and 80s. In all honesty, this way may be more true to the original comics. This version of the Punisher plays it a little different. In many ways the action scenes are scaled down and (aside from the fight with "The Russian"), are pretty quick and to-the-point. The big action scene in the finale is a testament to the style of the film and the tone they’re setting. That's another aspect of this film that I rather enjoyed: the tone. The film moves from darkly comical to just unrelentingly dark. One of the major action scenes, as I mentioned before, is the fight with a hitman referred to only as "The Russian" (Kevin Nash). He's a mountain of muscles that looks almost exactly as he did in the comics, right down to his red and white striped shirt. Their fight scene is set against the music of "La donna è mobile", which is being played by the fellow tenants in the building. In the midst of their struggle, Frank Castle’s apartment is all but destroyed. This is about as over-the-top as the film gets with the action sequences; you won’t find any slow motion or bullet-time here. Yet there are some other truly dark and tragic events that take place as well, particularly in this extended version of the film. The majority of the extended scenes have to do with Frank Castle confronting his friend from both the police force and before, when they served together in the military. These scenes are a great addition to the film and really contribute to the darker tone as well as fleshing out the story.



The Russian fights Frank Castle

Director Jonathan Hensleigh attempts to hold back on glorifying the Punisher too much. The Punisher is a deeply disturbed and depressed character. In the film he's suicidal and when he's not killing people or painstakingly carrying out his plan, he sits in his room drinking himself to death in an attempt to drown out the memories of his family in a very literal sense. The last scene of the film again pushes this feeling of the Punisher as a more tragic figure, futilely going on his mission to basically become a mass murderer of criminals. When he makes this vow, there's no triumphant music to accompany him or a sense of righteousness. There's only silence as he accepts his new fate. Something else that’s worth mentioning about this film is the music. The entire score and the main theme of The Punisher is composed by Carlo Siliotto and it embodies everything that the film is trying to say about the character. The solo trumpet captures the isolation and solitude, while the later accompaniments slowly build into something more powerful. It’s a very beautiful piece of music by itself.

Despite my praise of the film, I’m not trying to say that there are no flaws here. Certain aspects of the film detract from the experience a little bit. The other tenants in the building (played by Rebeecca Romijn, John Pinette and Ben Foster) where the Punisher lives are mainly there for comic relief. At times this works alright, but at others it feels out of place. There are other scenes that contain more of a comic-book feel such as the cars exploding into a flaming Punisher symbol, the very presence of "The Russian", and the fact that Frank Castle was rescued from death at the hands of the mobsters thanks to the help of what's basically explained to be a witch doctor. But the majority of my complaints boil down to mere nitpicking. The Punisher is a strong and entertaining revenge story balancing comic book elements with a very dark and serious tone. This is not a story of the rise of a hero, but the bitter and bloody fall.

Inception (2010)

Inception is the latest film from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan and it's arguably his best film to date. The story follows Cobb, a thief who illegally enters people dreams in order to steal ideas for various clients. This is done with a team and is referred to as Extraction, which executed in a manner best described as a very sci-fi heist. When he gets a new and potentially final contract from Saito (Ken Watanabe), the task altered to instead plant an idea within a target’s mind, in this case being Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the son of a rival businessman. This task is something far more difficult to do and is known as Inception. The biggest challenge to the mission becomes Cobb’s own personal demons which take the form of his late wife, Mal (played by Marion Cotiard); a beautiful and haunting apparition that's hell-bent on sabotaging the dream world he enters.

The way that people enter the dream world and interact with it is in some ways very reminiscent of other intelligent science fiction films and at times feels quite familiar. Various story elements and plot devices can be compared to those used in other films like The Matrix, Dark City, eXistenZ and especially Paprika. There's a device that literally plugs them into it, and while they are there, the environment can be manipulated in various ways, even to the point where entire cities can be rearranged. The concept is surreal and fascinating, and despite the theoretical complexities, Christopher Nolan manages to make the film incredibly easy to follow, even when entering dreams within dreams within dreams and even farther than that. The script feels very tight and contained and it's present within the editing as well. The different layers of the dream world are carefully cut and referenced to in order to establish a sense of forward momentum and also reveal the strange concept of time within the subconscious. The film is very clear about the way the dream world functions and is carefully divided into three basic acts. The opening is where the audience is dropped into the middle of an Extraction, the middle is the bulk of the exposition as the team is built and the characters are introduced, and the final act is the assignment. In many ways the story plays out as a heist film. There's even a crack team of characters, each with their own unique skills and purposes to fulfill in the job.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb

Ellen Page plays Ariadne, a student under Miles (Michael Caine), who's also Cobb’s mentor. While her role in the story is to be The Architect, the member of the team that designs the dream that the target will have, her real purpose is quite simple: she's there for exposition. In a film with a potentially confusing concept, she asks all the right questions as she enters the story knowing about as much as the audience. Aside from her personal interactions with Cobb, nearly everything she says or is told is an explanation of a concept of the rules of the dream world, which are actually explained clearly and are consistently evident through all the dream sequences. The character Arthur Penn is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and his job is to research the target’s personal history and provide the team with information. He also has one of the most bizarre and visually engaging action scenes in the entire film. The rest of the cast also gives strong performances, especially from Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy. Since Cillian Murphy is the one in which they need to plant the idea, he's given a surprising amount of characterization regarding his own issue with his father. We learn that the only way for Inception to work is if the target thinks that he came up with the idea personally and once it's planted within his subconscious, it will spread throughout his mind, dominating it. Aside from the moral implications of this task, this makes the dream world very personal, not only to Fischer, but to Cobb as well, since his mind begins affecting the dream world. This personal connection and attention paid to the characters is what makes the film more interesting to watch than other special effects driven action films. The visuals here are fantastic, but they serve a purpose and play off the characters involved, rather than replace them or dominate them. There's also a strong score by Hans Zimmer which suits the look and helps contributes to the pace of the film. Given everything that the film is and succeeds in doing, Inception makes for one of the most entertaining science fiction films of the past decade.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

Named after the Irish Ballad, The Wind That Shakes the Barley follows two brothers in Ireland who join the Irish Republican Army in the early twenties. Damien O'Donovan (played by Cillian Murphy) is the younger of the two and is also a doctor planning to work in a hospital in London. His older brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) is an active member of the IRA and a priority target of the British soldiers, or the “Black and Tans.” After witnessing some extreme violence done to friends and civilians, Damien decides to join his brother.

Essentially there are two parts to this film: one is of the training and operations style of the IRA while the other is of the different views within the IRA during aftermath dealing with the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the Irish Free-State. There are a few reasons why this division of the plot doesn’t work as well as it should and what I think hurts the film overall. In the very opening of the film we are shown the brutality and cruelty the British soldiers display when dealing with the Irish people. Within minutes after hearing of Damien’s resistance towards violence and joining the IRA, he changes his mind. From then on, until much later in the story, the film distances the audience from him and in many of the early scenes, he's little more than an extra; only seldom is he specifically shown to have more character development than others, such as his during scenes with Sinéad (Orla Fitzgerald), which serve as a minor romantic subplot. For much of the first half of the film, Director Ken Loach takes a semi-realistic and objective view of the IRA and the action, and some of these scenes are very intense and interesting to watch. The look of this film emits a strong sense of authenticity through the acting and cinematography.

It feels very realistic and works well but there's a noticeable departure from this later on, particularly after the Anglo-Irish Treaty goes into effect. At this point in the film, the story and style takes on a much more personal point of view focusing instead on the relationship between the two brothers who no longer see eye-to-eye. These are some of the better scenes in the film, as Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney play off each other well, but the overall experience feels uneven. Given the starting point (and especially the ending), the film should have focused and emphasized on this relationship more throughout the entire story. There's a line where Damien says to his brother in response to being told not to do anything stupid,

“Do you realize that you’ve been telling me that since I was 12 years of age?”

I hope his brother did, because the audience certainly had little indication of their relationship prior to this scene. In fact, I didn’t even realize they were brothers until after they had been arrested 20 minutes into the film. For the most part, this film works well showing both the good and the bad of the IRA at the time. On the one hand you can clearly see why a group like this would emerge under the circumstances, but on the other, you see many reasons why their successes were limited, particularly during the second half of the film.

Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney

Another slight issue I had with this film was just the desire for a little bit of context. Ireland has a complicated history and the 20s are a very specific time period. It would have been nice to have had a little bit of text before or after the opening credits to set up the period for those not too familiar with it. That said, the story isn’t too hard to follow and the acting is very naturalistic. There are also some great scenes showing off the green environment, which serves as a good contrast against the violence and sadness present in every home shown onscreen. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a powerful and interesting look at an ugly time in Ireland. Though it’s a bit uneven in what the focus of the film should be, it's still very much worth seeing.

Let's Roar! : The Mishandling of a Villain

The Mandarin in the Silver Age

Upon recently reading The Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction, I was reminded of a certain disappointment that I felt when watching the 2007 animated film The Invincible Iron Man. I had many complaints about it, but there was one in particular that I found to be incredibly frustrating. This was the handling of the Mandarin, the arch-nemesis of Iron Man. Before I get into the ways in which he was handled in the film, let me explain the character.


The modern Mandarin

He was created in 1964 by Stan Lee and Don Heck in Tales of Suspense #50 to be a new and menacing threat to Iron Man. Given the time, and Iron Man’s stories often dealing with the “Red Scare,” he was modeled very much after villains of the pulp stories, specifically Fu Manchu. Politically correct, he was not. I will stress however that, even at the time, he was written in a way to distance him from the communist government. In the comics the Chinese government was actually afraid of him and he ruled over a portion of the country that was isolated from the rest known as the Valley of Spirits. He didn’t agree with the government because he wanted to rule alone like his ancestor Genghis Khan. The concept of the Mandarin was to be Iron Mans opposite in almost every way. Iron Man is a super hero based on science and technology, while the Mandarin relies on his own martial arts skills (which are often shown to be superhuman), magic, and mysticism. Iron Man fights for freedom, justice and bettering the future through technology, while the Mandarin seeks to push the world back to a more violent and primitive state under his sole rule.

East versus West, magic versus technology, good versus evil, freedom versus oppression.

The Mandarin has also proved to be nearly equal to Tony Stark in intelligence, many times displaying his cunning and the meticulous nature of his planning. Over the past few decades, the Mandarin has evolved to be more of his own character, losing many of the old stereotypes that were originally attributed to him. His last major appearance in the Iron Man comics contained what I believe is his greatest story yet and solidified him as a terrific villain while taking into account all his past failings and flaws. After years spent meditating on his life and past failures, in complete isolation within a prison, he arrived at an epiphany: deciding that he was meant to save humanity instead of ruling it, he chose to release a virus upon the planet that would kill 97.5% of the earth’s population while the survivors would become more than human thus pushing them into the next stage of evolution creating a "world of gods." Iron Man stopped him in one of their most brutal fights in the history of the characters and made for one of the greatest Iron Man stories to date. Of all the villains in his rogues’ gallery, the Mandarin is the most personal, threatening, and interesting. His gimmick is that he wears ten rings, alien in nature, each with a different power on his fingers. The Iron Man films have made references to his existence through the terrorist organization called the Ten Rings, which in the first film captured Tony Stark and thus gave birth to Iron Man. The live action films have been careful to include the references to the Mandarin without revealing him and hopefully, in the likely event of a third film, he will be revealed in a manner that respects the characters' history and importance to the Iron Man franchise.


The Mandarin in The Invincible Iron Man.

Where the animated film version really failed for me, more so than simply animation qualities or bad writing, was the treatment of this villain in terms of his relationship to Tony Stark as well as his overall screen presence. The way the film inserts him into the story is that the Mandarin was once a violent and terrible ruler in a fictional dynasty. Tony Stark is excavating part of his kingdom for the Chinese government in order to secure other business contracts, but little does he realize that doing so could possibly mean his revival. Throughout the story we learn that the character of Li Mei is actually a descendent of the Mandarin, therefore he needs her blood to be resurrected. Eventually, she ends up sacrificing her body as well as his five rings for the soul of the Mandarin to use. Already there’s a problem here. The Mandarin in this film has only five rings, and one of them is more of a bracelet than a ring. I still don’t understand this change in one of the most crucial aspects of the character. Is having ten rings too much? Does chopping the number in half somehow make it more credible or believable? Even the Iron Man: Armored Adventures television series, which strangely depicts all of the Iron Man characters (including the Mandarin) as teenagers, got this part right. It’s a pointless change that makes no notable impact on the story. The film builds up the inevitable encounter between Iron Man and the Mandarin as a prophetic duel, centuries in the making. This fight must happen and the fate of the planet will be decided in the outcome. The revival of the Mandarin is likened to a coming Apocalypse.

So after he gets the rings and the blood he should awaken and fight as the Mandarin that everyone was expecting, right? Wrong. Apparently the extent of his revival was to be a large transparent ghost that follows around the naked body of Li Mei. They turned Iron Man’s greatest enemy into not only a non-character but a non-entity. This interpretation of the character is ludicrous. How is anyone supposed to take a villain seriously when his very movement requires a naked lady? Imagine if he won the battle. Then the world would be exposed to the sheer goofiness of his appearance. He merely floats there ordering Li Mei to do his bidding as if she were a puppet. Iron Man doesn’t even interact with him during the short climax of the film. In fact, for all intents and purposes, he basically just ignores him. There was no scene showing the two enemies face each other and acknowledge the dark reflection in the other. Instead, Tony Stark was pleading with Li Mei to stop being his puppet, which she does. This was far more than anticlimactic. It was a completely butchering of the characters relationship to one another. These are two characters that have a history in the comics spanning over 40 years. It should feel like a big deal when they finally meet. There is even an arc in the comic series in which the Mandarin’s entire plan was to test Tony Stark as his enemy, proving something to Stark and himself about their need to battle each other. The encounter ended with the Mandarin being lost in an explosion, laughing because by defeating him again, Tony Stark had proven himself to be the Mandarin’s true opponent. He’s a character that Tony Stark has his own obsession with, demanding both his hatred and respect. To see him reduced to a mere transparent image next to a naked woman that Tony Stark has no believable connection with is just…disappointing.

The Mandarin in Iron Man: Armored Adventures

Essential reads for the Mandarin:
• Casey, Joe, author. Iron Man: Enter The Mandarin. Canete, Eric, art. Marvel Comics, May 21, 2008.
• Knauf, Daniel and Charlie, authors. Iron Man vol 5: Haunted. de la Torre, Robert, art. Marvel Comics, July 2, 2008.
• Busiek, Kurt, author. The Invincible Iron Man vol 3, #9-10. Chen, Sean, art. Marvel Comics, October-November, 1998.