The Punisher Review - Special Guest You Call Those Tactics?

 [Music] hi and welcome to the dynamic duel podcast a weekly show where we review superhero films and debate the superiority between marvel and dc by comparing their characters in stat based battle simulations i’m marvelous joe and i’m his twin brother johnny dc and in this episode we are going to review the 2004 movie the punisher starring thomas jane it’s not a great movie and it’s never really fun to review bad movies but we do have a guest coming on later this episode sergeant ken johnson of the us army who’s going to be helping us break down not just the film but also the militaristic aspects of the character and the weapons and stuff it’s gonna be great ken johnson is a great guy he’s an executive producer of this show with his own podcast called you call those tactics and we will be linking to his show within our show notes so look forward to hearing from him later on this episode as well as checking out his own show after you listen yeah ken analyzes films a little bit differently than we do we always kind of take a story approach to it but his real world analysis is so fascinating to listen to and i can’t wait for you guys to experience that later on in this episode before we get into our review we’re going to break down the comic book movie news from the past week of which uh there was just one news item and it was kind of lame but we got the new trailer for the zack snyder’s justice league film that’s going to be on hbo max you shut your damn mouth as always we list our segment times in our episode description so feel free to check out the show notes if you want to skip ahead to a particular topic quick reminder guys that this podcast now has a card game out called dynamic duel war that you can get by joining us on patreon on any one of our tiers the lowest of which is only two dollars a month you can find information on how to get the game along with other bonus content if you want to have fun simulating battles between marvel and dc characters check us out at patreon.com dynamic duel and just a quick reminder guys to please subscribe to our show if you haven’t already and if you have please please help us grow our podcast audience by leaving a quick rating or review on whatever platform you’re listening to us on or by sharing us with your fellow dc and marvel fans and note that i said please it’s the magic word i thought the magic word was shazam that’s true that’s true shazam leave us through a raiding review but with that out of the way quick to the no prize so a no prize is an award that marvel used to give out up until the 90s to fans our version the dynamic duel no prize is a digital award that we post on social media that i personally draw for those who we feel gave the best answer to our question of the week last week’s question coming off the news that disney plus is going to be making a wakanda spin-off show with the director of black panther ryan coogler we asked what would you like the black panther spin-off television series on disney plus to be about got a lot of great answers here thank you guys so much for taking the time to visit our website and record your answer there we do have a list of honorable mentions as well as the no prize winner uh to break down our first honorable mention goes to zachary hepburn who said hey dynamic duel zach hepburn here and i have to say i want to see a spin-off show about umbaku you know make him become the man ape right have him like maybe hunt down the great white gorilla you know kill it eat its flesh bathe it now it sounds like he got cut off because our voicemails that you leave have a 20 second limit but the idea is really good mbaku was one of my favorite characters to come out of the black panther film yeah he’s just dying for further development considering that he was portrayed as the leader of the mountain tribe and he just seemed like a really strong dude it would be cool to show that he actually does get powers in the comic books you know he did feast on the flesh of the rare white gorilla and he became ban ape and it would be cool if he got those powers in his own spin-off show i think it’s a fantastic idea good answer zack our next honorable mention goes to jeff miles jr who said hey john and joe’s jeff here to answer the no prize question what should the black panther show be about i think it’s very clear it should be about shuri and t’challa as younger teens and make more sense for the next movie yeah i think that’s a great way to set up the next black panther film if you explore shuri and t’challa’s younger years you might be able to provide some insight as to what’s happening with t’challa in black panther 2 and perhaps provide more foreshadowing as to why someone like shuri might take up the black panther mantle or someone else who knows that answer is the best way to kind of explain t’challa’s absence from the upcoming sequel movie yeah we’re gonna kind of get a glimpse at t’challa’s childhood in the upcoming what if uh animated show where he apparently becomes a version of star-lord i mean it’s set in an alternate universe so who knows if that’s what his childhood would really be like but yeah it’s just a glimpse our final honorable mention goes to shane habison who said hello johnny and joe i think the black panther spin-off would be about an introduction to the white wolf you know who he is i think you keep pronouncing my last name wrong it’s habit not habazine yeah hey listen to your little [ __ ] tell that to ufc fighter ivana hobazine because that’s how she pronounces her name that was the only source we had on how to pronounce your last name but uh that was hilarious uh thank you for your answer it’s a great answer i think the white wolf would make a really compelling wakanda spin-off show the white wolf is the leader of the secret wakandan police the hatu serzei they kind of deal with wakanda’s international enemies covertly they’ve actually been exiled from wakanda by t’challa who didn’t want to use that secret police anymore but their leader white wolf who is actually t’challa’s adoptive brother he’s still very loyal to wakanda and still carries out what he believes to be wakanda’s best interests it would be very much like a spy intrigue kind of television series that would deal with wakanda’s influence on the outside world but not directly deal with the black panther character himself yeah and if by the time you got to like black panther 3 if people were still you know kind of uneasy about t’challa returning you could use that show to set up white wolf as the new black panther no he’s white oh what never mind that’s just a bad look wow jonathan i didn’t know that yeah he was a member of a white family whose plane had crashed into wakanda by accident and they kind of adopted him his name is hunter the white wolf my bad thanks again for the answer shane habson yeah thanks for being your loyal listener man and putting up with us mispronouncing your name all the time before we name the no prize winner we want to thank everybody who reached out to us uh via dynamicduel.com and left us an answer including john straurowski kevin odalon and jacob bell there were no wrong answers for this particular question they were all great so thank you for sending those but the winner of this week’s snow prize is calvin mims who said hey guys calvin mims here love the show i would love a game of thrones esque show where it’s just wakanda and atlantis just feuding and battling out i think it’ll be a great show and i would love it i love the way he just like gushed over his answer at the very end it’s a great answer like if you could do game of thrones with any marvel property it would be black panther and wakanda yeah these like feuding kingdoms and their like political differences and stuff like that would be so great not only would you have great political drama but you would get to see neymar the submariner and i think that’s awesome i always thought that the sequel was going to go down that route and it still might but i i think in order to truly delve into all the different intricacies between that particular feud i think it would have to be a television series yeah plus i mean what better way to introduce neymar you can’t do it in his own movie because there’s no way that’s going to live up to the aquaman film right no that’s exactly you admitted it oh [ __ ] i take that back no it would totally annihilate it no way anyway congrats again to calvin mims for winning this week’s no prize uh if you the listener want a shot at winning gero no prize stay tuned to later on this episode when we’ll be asking another question of the week and now that that’s done on to the news okay so on valentine’s day zack snyder dropped the latest trailer for the hbo max film zack snyder’s justice league and i have to wonder how anyone is still a marvel fan after this what exactly every trailer that zack snyder drops we’ve said this before is like the best trailer that has ever existed in the history of existence you are way overboard here it was a mediocre trailer at best what did you watch the trailer i did how was this finding this one a fantastic trailer it looked like it was 90 just alternate shots from the theatrical cut of justice league are you [ __ ] kidding me dude like 95 of the shots in this trailer are not in the theatrical film yeah because they’re just alternate shots but a lot of the story is still there no it’s not all right let’s break this damn thing down so the first shot is actually from bvs it looks like you know it’s superman he’s dying he just got stabbed in the heart by doomsday and he’s letting out like this death rattle and you see it echoing across space this is supposed to be like the quote-unquote bell that lex luthor is talking about with voice over during this scene that uh the new gods apparently here signaling that superman is dead and earth may be ripe for the taking that sound makes it all the way to the shores of the mascara maybe it just might be good editing and we see queen hippolyta watch as the temple that held the mother box just kind of crumbles into the ocean we also see uh glimpses of the nightmare sequence again so we’re revisiting that world and it’s so cool to see ben affleck back in the batman cowl in that nightmare suit i just love him as batman i’m so happy he returned for this well the nightmare scene was your least favorite moment from bbs it was absolutely was i’m really glad they’re doing it again here though just to add more context the more context you could add to that scene i think the better that scene will get that’s true especially considering the fact that we’re actually seeing darkseid in this film before when we saw the omega symbol we had no idea what that was but here we actually see like that symbol being created by steppenwolf he slams his hammer down into the ground it creates like this outward moving explosion that forms like this omega symbol along with this other like intricate pattern in the ground it’s it’s really cool that wasn’t dark side that did that no that was steppenwolf did you watch the [ __ ] trailer i did i was kind of bored oh my gosh we see diana exploring some like underground catacombs of like a greek temple that shows an image of dark side and then we cut to apocalypse where we see [ __ ] dark side and he looks so cool yeah that was cool to know that we actually will visit apocalypse within this movie we get to see darkseid with his eyes glowing like a badass way cooler than thanos holy [ __ ] get the [ __ ] out of here we also get to see da’sod we get to see granny goodness she looks awesome and we also get to see in a really important scene i think stepping wolf bowing down to dark side or some people are saying that’s a holographic image of assad i’m not sure but i think it kind of establishes that hey steppenwolf is not the big bad here it’s actually darkseid now as steppenwolf is like taking on a whole bunch of amazons bruce wayne starts talking about how he’s going to build up this super team and we get shots of the different members including aquaman who’s fighting steppenwolf in a scene that looks way cooler than what we got in the theatrical cut we see cyborg i think it’s nightmare cyborg he has like this huge machine gatling cannon coming off of his shoulder like war machine style what a ripoff hey we did it better i don’t know what to say that is not better that’s not better we’re just talking about better get out of here you get out of here and really we just get to see the team like in various action shots forming as they’re talking about superman about bringing him back and waving his you know red cape in front of the bull that is steppenwolf what kind of metaphor was that that was alfred’s metaphor did you watch the [ __ ] trailer i i kind of tuned out a few times oh my gosh are you gonna see henry cavill in his black suit and it is so refreshing to see him without the cgi mouth in this film oh yes oh my god he looks so much better without cgi face yeah i think i’m most excited to see his superman uh within this movie how it should have been yeah yeah absolutely like i feel like zack snyder’s series of dc films is kind of like a superman trilogy i think this will sort of culminate his arc in a way we get to see cyborg flying and steppenwolf taking on the night crawler and we also see like the flash running through what i imagine is like maybe the speed force just towards this giant massive blue explosion it looks really cool and just really cosmic i can’t wait to see like his nightmare suit i think it’s gonna be the one that bruce wayne had a premonition of in bvs we hear wonder woman talking about the age of heroes and we get a glimpse of that you know seeing the first match up against darkseid when he first invades earth yeah we’ve already seen that yeah we got like the bare bones of that fight we’re gonna see a lot more of it i think but this all leads up to the end of the trailer where we go back to the nightmare world and we get to see ben affleck’s batman interact with jared leto’s joker in their first like speaking interaction it’s amazing and everyone’s flipping out about the joker’s opening line we live in a society which of course is a pretty popular meme and already in this scene jared leto’s performance as the joker way better than what he did in suicide squad i don’t like his look in this oh my gosh i think he looked better in black and white than he does in color why i don’t know because like the red mouth makeup thing looked kind of weird it looks really sinister and evil like he just fed on something that’s blood if you don’t like any color just watch the movie in black and white you’ll be fine well maybe i will the film of course comes out on hbo max march 18th in the us before the release of the film we’re supposed to get one more trailer but honestly i’m totally sold with this like just gave me the movie already i think the time has come for my semi-annual reminder to you to check your expectations okay this movie is likely not going to be everything you ever hoped and dreamed it would be dude this is like getting an all-new justice league film like more than half of it is new there’s supposed to be a new ending it’s going to be amazing check yourself before you wreck yourself once again what no [ __ ] you they teased so many great scenes in this film with this trailer i’m so excited and that brings us to our question of the week what was your favorite moment of the recent trailer for zack snyder’s justice league record your answer at dynamicduel.com by clicking on the red microphone button which will prompt you to leave us a voicemail your message can be up to 20 seconds and don’t forget to leave your name in case we include you on the podcast we’ll pick our favorite answer and draw that person a dynamic duel no prize that we’ll post to social media be sure to record your answer before february 20th when we record our next episode but that does it for all the news for this episode so let’s go ahead and get into our main event where we review the 2004 film the punisher and we’ll bring on our guest us army sergeant ken johnson to help us do that okay the punisher starring thomas jane uh directed by jonathan hensley came out in 2004. jonathan and i we were both 18 seniors in high school and around that time we were both strongly considering joining the army as we were heavily courted by our local recruiter uh and that’s the extent of our military experience that’s all of it thinking about joining the military but joining us today is a man with actual military experience currently serving in the us army providing analysis and assessment he’s a film geek who could literally murder your ass please welcome the host of the podcast you call those tactics army sergeant ken johnson hey guys thanks for having me uh so yeah i probably could actually and literally murder you not just figuratively oh uh i know i don’t make any qualms regarding how much of a badass military guys are one of my biggest regrets about not joining is i feel like if i did join i would be just so much cooler than i i currently am but oh yeah uh one question that we ask all of our guests on the show is do you prefer marvel or dc oh it’s dc all the way uh obviously it’s the greatest of all yes which you know joseph it’s all on you uh it’s really your fault for not swinging me to the dark side um i’ll keep trying so i i grew up a dc nerd my very first film watching was superman you know and from that point on it was it was all over um then going into batman and i think it’s probably the fact that in the early 90s what did marvel really have to show for it with the shitty uh captain america uh the terrible fantastic four and the really really bad punisher which thankfully the movie we’re going to talk about today kind of gives a little bit of credence but you know whatever but realistically since about 2008 with the advent of iron man uh i do enjoy watching the the marvel films i love that they were as grounded as they were and i i honestly credit robert downey jr and john favreau 100 with bringing in all forms of comic book fans not just the marvel lights but i do love me some zack snyder because it should be dark and dark and darker i feel like that’s the way that the people now are looking at it’s just the the feeling that people have now in the world and that he’s trying to bring that into it now sometimes do i really wish that we’d have a little bit more christopher reeve over henry cavill yes but i feel like it’s just an evolution of the character yeah yeah i mean like post 911 these are pretty dark times like it’s not just in comic books where buildings are falling so it kind of makes sense that the zeitgeist of storytelling and the tone of those stories would be a little bit darker films usually reflect the times that they’re made in so i i totally agree with that um ken you’re an executive producer of this show but you also have your own podcast called you call those tactics please tell us what that show is about and what you do there uh my podcast really kind of spurned out of the fact of it doesn’t matter what type of person you are what kind of work environment you’re in there’s going to be a movie about that work environment you know that the it guys will watch things like hackers and go there’s no way uh or you know the food service dudes are looking at waiting going yeah that’s pretty true but for military folks it’s it’s worse because uh military-grade military-esque human beings as they’re seen by the public are way out of proportion with what real military life is like so you know joseph you said that you know you would be so much cooler had you joined the army look i’ll be honest with you most of the army life and military life is a lot like yes you can join the army and learn how to sweep a motor pool hate life big ditches clean latrines and then you’re walking to the shower in iraq and you get shot dead that’s pretty much how the army is um it’s glimmers of awesomeness met with the mundaneness of oh my god why didn’t i join the air force that’s that’s pretty much the army life so what i did was i took those feelings and and really the catalyst of watching military movies with my wife and friends going yeah that wouldn’t happen yeah that wouldn’t happen don’t even get me started on the hurt locker i took those feelings and then i applied them to military films uh so most of the time it’s just me i’ll take a movie and then break down the pros the cons the accuracies the inaccuracies most of the time it’s more the inaccuracies and just violently [ __ ] all over them but i also will bring on people i’ve deployed with friends uh even had my father on once which was that was a terrible episode everyone should go listen to it but if you want to see me who typically i have no issue with talking amongst anybody but just the complete awkwardness of listening to my dad talk about boobs it was great but that’s what the podcast is and i’ve actually started branching out with this last week i am taking real life battles and then breaking those down for the tactics that would have decided it in a different way and really the reason i do that is because i’m a huge history nerd and with what my job is i can actually take these historical events and break them down in a way that people understand okay custer’s last stand could have gone a very different way but the reason why it went the way it did was really the hubris of the man and i think that people find that uh insightful and i find it more rewarding sometimes than the [ __ ] films i have to review that sounds awesome yeah you downplay military life and and i’m sure it’s very different from what all of us expect but i gotta say we just appreciate you and everyone else in the military the work you guys do is for all of us and yeah we can’t extend our appreciation enough towards you guys yeah thank you uh yeah thank you guys uh i can honestly say my last tour in germany i was listening to you guys weekly so you guys are reaching out and touching people all around the world and a lot of us that like that little piece of home uh even if it is you know marvel [ __ ] on dc or dc emerging triumphantly um that’s the kind of stuff that we appreciate i think i love that you like dc more i appreciate that are you at least a fan of the punisher though oh of course i mean there’s if if if we’re gonna rate superheroes uh that are near and dear to my heart on the marvel side punisher is definitely top five nice good well jonathan and i are very grateful to have you on as the guest for this episode because the punisher has a military background you know he’s a guy who uses his former military training as a means to enact punishment on criminals and jonathan and i can’t really speak to that seeing as we’re really you know a couple of vaginas who know nothing about guns or the military so please be gentle with us but to that end we thought it would be great to get your thoughts on this film as both a member of the military and as a cinephile because let’s face it we had to make this episode interesting somehow it’s not a great movie yeah i appreciate that you guys self-select yourselves as vaginas and i didn’t have to say it it’s been a while since i’ve seen this film i forgot just how generic it is like i remember liking it when i first saw it in theaters but man as a punisher film it’s kind of boring it was a little heartbreaking for me of seeing the cast again like you i remember seeing this when i was in high school i was a junior when this came out and i was already way into guns and the whole idea of vengeance is a feeling punishment is a true fact and a natural selection so it was incredible uh so i watched this film just like raw yeah that was awesome uh but then i watched it like two times last week and i was like oh god how how did you get rebecca romain to be so plain yeah well she’s not covered in blue paint is the thing you know or naked yeah and naked yeah the talent behind and in front of the film is actually pretty commendable uh director jonathan hensley he was a prolific screenwriter in hollywood he wrote the scripts for movies like the rock gone in 60 seconds die hard with a vengeance armageddon some pretty good action films and this movie doesn’t really come close to any of those which is disappointing because i’m a big fan of thomas jane and john travolta i think they’re both great actors did jonathan hensley write this film as well yes he did yeah he wrote and directed it wow that’s surprising yeah and the story turned out just so generic and cheesy at some points and frankly lacking in decent action and that was my main takeaway from the film when i first saw it in theaters there was like maybe one and a half gunfights in this entire film because he had the castle family massacre where he shot the propane tank there was the harry heck fight where punisher basically crashes his car and then uses a ballistic knife and then there was the final club shootout which that was pretty damn good i wanted more of that from my punisher movie ultimately as a military man ken how would you rate the action in this movie like how accurate was it in terms of the weapons used and how would you assess the tactics that frank castle employed um zero out of zero so as the reigning military correspondent for your guys’s podcast i’ll go ahead and weigh in on some i’ll say uh inaccuracies so the points well made like i really enjoyed the film from a aspect that looked and had a lot of the character development like a garth ennis run yeah of the punisher but then neutered everything great about it and then just kept the shitty characters yes um as far as the weapons and the tactics so i am a huge gun nut definitely i own pretty much everything that he used in here with the exception of the compound bow uh and i can tell you that he used them all wrong um and i don’t know how much we’re going to go into the plot but i’ll say frank castle in in the comics was a vietnam vet a marine forced recon uh so very much into that level of brutality uh which brings the character to where he is now um because i can tell you that the way guys are trained in vietnam uh versus how we are trained now completely different uh for for very good reasons um because the way we fight now is more with an eye towards how the world sees us especially because in the age of social media and media coverage anything and everything that anybody in uniform does can and will be held against us um so we have to look at things from a very technical aspect interesting so in this movie there’s there’s a ton of inaccuracies already brought up to it and i have notes and notes and notes and that’s because i’m that type of person um but i’ll just go and start with how dave kind of pulled up a a dossier on frank castle which i’m trying to figure out how he did that but okay well we’ll suspend belief that the guy playing counter-strike could you know hack into uh dod and we’ll move on um the fact that his military training they said he was part of 12th special forces group now i’ll give a little bit of background on this so the 12th special forces group was the original green berets and it would make sense that he would have that type of training the problem is the timelines don’t match up because the twin special forces group was actually deactivated in 93 right after the first desert storm now they kind of leave it ambiguous based on the the photos but based on the timeline of the film and the way it looks is like at present in 2004 it would probably make more sense that he was involved in afghanistan which means he would definitely wouldn’t have been part of 12th special forces group his secondary being in part of a ctu which they call the counter-terrorism unit that doesn’t exist because everybody is part of the counter-terrorism unit in the fact that we’re the military um now there are special special groups that work uh different missions and a lot of i think the pieces that they used for this film in that the training and tactics that frank uses probably would have laid into a lot of the special forces joint special forces units that currently operate today the problem is is that in the film yeah all of it’s wrong it’s it’s just all wrong the employment of weapons the weapon systems that were used the type of explosives but most of that i feel like is really the nuance of the time because early 2000s movies everything exploded with the force of a neutron bomb even a hand grenade so i really can’t beat up on him too much for that however the perfect example is when he’s fighting the russian which hurt my heart because the russians probably my favorite villain in punisher comics especially after he’s reanimated um and becomes voluptuous yes that was crazy it hurt my heart but yeah him throwing a grenade out of his bathroom and then to have it hit back in with a crowbar like a baseball uh it’s just none of that works no self-respecting special forces guy would do that especially because they’re augmenting the explosion uh it would kill him regardless just based on the concussion would the bathtub actually have saved his life uh much like the refrigerator in indiana jones for yes and no so based on the construction of the bathtub if it was old cast iron which is what they’re probably going with all uh like lethal weapon two it could absorb some of the concussion the problem is is he didn’t have anything over top of him and the way that the grenade landed it would have blown the bathtub and everything out of the wall and then him with it so no to suffice it to say yeah so to go back to your original question of the three major like action scenes so yes the the castle family massacre with you know all the henchmen that looked like they were extras out of the matrix film the employment of of the weapons by the castle guys so they both used remington shotguns side-by-side 12-gauge shotguns so two rounds apiece at least i will say that they did a pretty good job on ammo count so they didn’t fall into the movie trope of unlimited ammunition but i never pay attention to that so that’s interesting it’s another reason why i can’t watch movies with anybody but myself and like a few choice friends because that’s all we do and there’s like a white board involved and how many rounds are actually in it you can’t enjoy a film it’s just the way it is uh you have to rip it apart and then maybe pull the the slight happiness out of it but yeah so the systems that they used worked the problems were the amount of ammunition that they were using and how they were using it so blowing up the propane tank that doesn’t happen you can’t blow up a propane tank by shooting it if mythbusters proves anything because i remember that episode yeah yeah but that was cool it looked good but the rest of the weapon systems used uh i mean it’s pretty much normal fair so that the bad guys had oozies and mac tens and the scorpions all nine millimeter the problem is is that nobody seems to have any recoil ever the one thing i will point out is when roy schneider who had his worst cameo ever because he’s a pretty great actor and he was relegated to about three minutes of screen time right it was discussing his cult 1911s that he board out the barrel and added compensators so i’ll just go ahead and go through what those two things mean one that’s just to make the guns look cool and that’s pretty much it so when you bore out a barrel what he’s talking about is so inside every barrel and if you’ve watched any csi or any kind of show like that they talk about how what the marks left on the bullet look like to match a gun with a bullet so boring that out is actually effectively taking all of those grooves out of the barrel the problem is then that means that you can’t hit anything because those grooves are what gives your gun accuracy and or it won’t cycle correctly so when you say something like oh i bored out the barrels so basically what you said is you took two perfectly good 1911 cults the gun of world war ii that so many people love and you made it useless yeah the grooves make the bullet spin as it comes out of the barrel correct and that makes the bullet fly more accurately right yeah yes so that’s it’s called rifling it’s what turned a musket into a rifle and what made you know people be able to hit something past 10 feet versus 100 feet uh and that’s the reason and then the compensators are really just called muzzle brakes and what happens is it opens up the end of the barrel so that the gases come out the sides so there’s less recoil that is a good thing the problem is that the colt 1911 depends on a lot of that gas to make it function correctly so if you are pulling back the recoil by removing the gases from cycling the weapon it can cause it to jam or not function correctly so yeah not not great again makes it look cool but definitely not useful and frank was like really impressed by the modifications that’s funny it’s yeah it hurt my face just all over my face it hurt like i cried softly into the night because of that like i said other than that the weapons that he employed were very much standard fare really he just used an m4 carbine which was the standard rifle that the military uses uh a composite bow which other than rambo has no real effect in a tactical situation uh because we use suppressors we’re big kids uh and that’s how we go and do things silently because here’s the thing with a bow and arrow you don’t just die once you’re hit with an arrow even if it goes through your neck you don’t just die so what you’re wanting to do is actually kill these people and make sure that they don’t do anything so shooting them in the throat with a arrow is really just going to cause them to scream gurgly but you know walk around with an arrow sticking out of your neck which to me kind of ruins your surprise somebody’s shooting arrows around here yes i have to admit like when i saw him like using the bow like in the final scene i was like oh he’s so smart it’s so silent he’s just taking those guys down i had no idea that that’s a bad idea if we don’t think about these things right well the the way i look at it is just like the baron of evil in from kingdom of heaven discussing how he fought for three days with an arrow through his testicle that’s really all you need to know about arrows uh there’s very very few times that you all have an instant kill even if you shoot somebody through the heart it’s not 100 likely it’s going to kill them instantly so yeah for the rest of the battle uh a lot of the problems kind of in lay and his tactics used uh with his explosives so his anti-personnel minds and his claymores yeah he uses those a lot uh the problem with anti-personnel mines is is the problem that runs throughout all of movies in the fact that people think it’s a huge explosion that kills people like personnel no it’s the fragmentation that kills people so claymores don’t explode gigantic balls of flame they explode but then they push pieces of metal about the size of a shark tooth about 300 feet going very fast and they’re very hot that’s how people die so in the size room uh that all the goons are standing in everybody would have been dead just just everybody really there would have there wouldn’t have been much of a cool gun fight if one of those had gone off in such a small condensed place now correct me if i’m wrong but when i watched it this time i kind of thought it was very foolish of him to be going into a gunfight with pockets full of explosives if he got shot in one of those explosives like he would have been dead right it depends so uh most explosives are actually inert until you cause it to explode so detonate it uh and detonators really are a a catalyst so all explosives work on a chemical basis like when you start a fire using gas you have to introduce heat or an ignition source to that gas in order for it to explode that’s what an explosive does so the ap mines what they use is the trip wire which will actually pull the detonator and actually have it sit inside the blasting cap which is what causes the explosion and they they actually prove this uh you can shoot c4 all day long but you actually have to incorporate a blasting cap and a detonator for it to explode well that just ruins the movie rush hour for me exactly i mean they do they do it for a reason which you already said if i’m carrying around a explosive on my person i don’t want it going off if somebody nudges it or shoots at me and it goes off i want to be the one that causes it to explode yeah what did you think about castle’s primary strategy in this movie to get revenge is not storming the castle as it were it’s through blackmail and that was one of the things that i hated about this movie like hensley he seemed to want to try to make this revenge plot like very epic and very cunning like account of monte cristo story where the hero dismantles his enemy from the shadows but to me the punisher has always been more direct more of a force of nature not without guile and cunning but you know he knows there are more efficient ways to get the job done than lugging around this fake fire hydrant all day you know typically in the comics he vets his enemy he strategizes he executes and on to the next target but here you know he’s hiding earrings and beds and he’s pretending to blackmail closeted homosexuals there was just too much petty scheming on the punisher’s end like why would he go through all that trouble with a blackmail scheme with so many variables so many things out of his control so much that could go wrong when he could have just like reconned and stormed howard saint’s mansion so there are two pieces to this one i completely agree with you it is completely outside of the punisher as a character the punisher himself will do all that he needs to do to set the conditions so that he is able to be successful but he’s not going to use what i’ll call psychological operations on people when you start introducing things like in this film uh you know utilizing his targets vanity and really self-destructive nature against him uh those are variables that even the best late plan is going to fail and that’s the thing that did not happen in this film there is no such thing as the perfect plan uh everything sucks as soon as something happens um world war ii uh general patton said no plan survives first contact none uh so what do you do you go right up the middle and then you know the nazis and and the soviets used to say there’s no real point in memorizing american doctrine because we don’t even follow it so that and that’s the key to frank castle he’s going to set his conditions by doing all of his reconnaissance all of his intelligence operations using everything at his disposal to set it so that when he does attack he’s not running into a heavily fortified area that he’s not going to be able to walk out of but what i do enjoy in the comics versus this is that even his plans will have a monkey wrench thrown into it you know in that there’s always something that pushes back against them that he has no control over or he’s got to overcome in this film there was never really that worry other than the russian and even that was a two-minute fight which ended with him throwing him down the stairs so it required that deus ex machina of i’m going to hit him with hot scalding corn flakes and then goldberg spear him downstairs breaking his neck uh so he doesn’t even get that kill count which you know that’s the most important thing in a punisher movie absolutely yeah one of the greatest things about reading the punisher comics and particularly in garth and his stories is seeing the punisher’s ability to improvise when things do go wrong and you’re right in this movie nothing ever really went wrong regarding his plan and that’s unfortunate because that’s something that you like to see in movies in general because it adds interest to the drama and it’s kind of what made this movie a little bit so generic from looking at 2021 to 2004 i definitely see why they did what they did because looking at you know the first three years of the afghan and into the iraq conflict you know there was also the interrogation issues that were running into you know how the cia was interrogating people so i saw that in the film so that kind of was a wink and a nod and a hahaha we see what you’re doing and we’re going to turn it on its head uh so that instead of the punisher being the punisher which is yeah i’m going to interrogate you but then i’m going to kill you because i’ve gotten all the information i need unless i really really need you this is the i’m gonna poke you with a popsicle while searing my dinner and then i’m going to let you go and you are an integral part of my plan and that’s that’s really what i saw so then you know fast forward to john barenthal’s marvel netflix show that is the brutality of the punisher but you also do see that same feeling of taking the events of the days but having that winking nod and okay well he uses his badness for a good purpose quote unquote but we’re going to actually throw nuance at you yeah yeah they dress like issues like gun control in the modern netflix punisher series and stuff like that but yeah i was pissed off when uh the punisher ended up not killing mickey because i feel like in the comics that’s what he would have done he would have just torched the guy after he got the information he needed i feel like that’s what ray stephenson’s punisher would have done in punisher war zone for sure oh definitely i wish there was an amalgamation honestly that tom jane had actually come back for warzone because i thought jane was actually really good punisher type that they didn’t have to go full jason six foot eight and hulking you don’t need that as a punisher that he needs to be light and quick and built but be able to be believable as as a soldier that you know not captain america he’s just a normal guy that has a ton of training that has one really shitty day yeah i i really liked thomas jane in this role i mean like i do wish that he were given a better movie to star in and we did get to see shades of that in the fan film called dirty laundry which is a quasi-independently made sequel to this film i don’t know if you guys have seen it but it’s on youtube i do highly recommend it because it’s a look at what thomas jane’s punisher could have been if given the right script and the right cinematography but thomas jane i think he had the look down he definitely had the voice the demeanor to me at least of what the punisher would be like prior to this movie he was always kind of like this scrawny guy but he underwent some serious training for this role uh both physical and with weapons do you know about the training that he went through uh so tom jane went through a very similar training as a lot of actors in that day because of insurance issues what they do is they hire a military consultant and put them through like a two-week boot camp basically enough training so that it looks believable how they hold a gun how they move with a gun and that i will say jane did a good job especially as you look across his filmography you could see that he was willing to learn and he didn’t have the pretty boy matt damon-esque saving private ryan quality to him where it wasn’t yeah that’s matt damon playing a soldier it was okay this is thomas jane and he became this character and i feel like he did a good job the military contractor uh i did not get his name but he’s done a lot of great films he was a tied to uh world of valor and then a couple of other really kind of b rated uh military films interesting what did you think about the film’s decision to change frank castle from a marine to an army soldier i thought he was in delta force but you said that he was part of the the 12th division so they called him 12th group which is like their green berets so the difference between the green berets and the delta is training and it’s even smaller a select group really when you’re talking about special operations folks it’s all about training and their job me as an army guy i am always happy to [ __ ] on crayon-eating marines um but that’s just because i’m army uh honestly i feel like the character could be any special operation soldier uh it doesn’t have to be a marine uh it works well in the comics because it ties very well to the camaraderie of that group and that’s something that the marine corps has over the army is that every marine that graduates and becomes a marine is a marine forever army it’s a little bit more difficult because we’re a larger force we have camaraderie amongst ourselves but a soldier from one division won’t look at another soldier in another division and be automatically brothers whereas the marine corps does uh and i think that that’s the reason why in the comics it’s worked so well for him to maintain that uh why it works so well in the marvel series but i don’t really see it being a huge issue say in this film now i’ve always wondered something about the comics in the comics again frank was part of forest recon but he also went through the army’s airborne school and trained with the navy’s underwater demolition team which i guess qualifies him as a navy seal and i was never quite sure how that worked like is that plausible for a marine to get both army and navy training oh definitely so army is the one that runs the airborne school so everybody will go through the airborne training from the army you can go through navy demolitions uh but that does not make you a seal you actually have to go through buds and become a seal but marines can do it so it is definitely plausible especially because i mean i’ve gone through marine schools i’ve gone through air force schools i really i’m definitely not as cool as frank castle nor will i ever be as cool as frank castle oh don’t say that about yourself yeah no the different forces the different branches of the military have different jobs the marines kind of get a [ __ ] into the stick because they are owned by the navy so the navy is always going to be their daddy but their job is to be the amphibious assault and the first ones in that’s their whole gig which is the thing that the army loves to hold over the marines that the largest amphibious assault was actually conducted by the army in that normandy invasion oh really so the marines aren’t even the best at what they do uh we still hold the title um that’s why they call them marines yep that never even registered with me until right now amphibious assault marines oh my god i suck [Laughter] what did you say marine stands for again oh my ass riding in navy equipment that’s pretty good and i get a lot of hate mail but that’s okay [Laughter] it’s all part of the uh the rivalry exactly what are your thoughts on uh space force uh i wish i was part of them uh however the the name is terrible they could have gone with anybody but guardians because now all i think of is destiny and really it’s just an offshoot of the air force i think there’s a reason for them to be there but until technology actually catches up they’re just going to be second fiddle to the air force i always think of guardians of the galaxy yeah or like you know ganthet from what green lantern yeah nevermind that was good i liked it yay um regarding thomas jane again i do think the movie does a good job of believably portraying the character’s journey from a family man to an alcoholic bent on revenge to a vigilante anti-hero and despite it being an apparent suicide mission he does learn in the end that good memories can save your life and you can make new good memories even if those new good memories will entail blowing the heads off of criminals it wasn’t much of an arc but that being said there wasn’t much of an arc for any of the characters within this movie uh including howard saint who was played by john travolta i feel like the movie like spent its entire casting budget like on john travolta and roy schneider i was about to say rob schneider [Laughter] you can do it you know just like those two actors alone because everyone else is almost you know a no-name actor maybe except for rebecca romain well i also thought will patton did a really good job in this movie he was actually my favorite actor within this film i think he gave a really great nuanced performance he was basically howard saint’s head lackey and lawyer in the film but yeah the movie did get some pretty good grabs as far as casting goes and john travolta always plays a great villain although i have seen him do it better in other films like i think he was certainly more interesting in films like face off or broken arrow or uh look who’s talking three there you go the only unique thing about howard saint in this movie was that i guess he was a creature of habit which frank is able to use against him and he was also very possessive of his wife olivia but that was a little bit weird apparently he was a money launderer for a pair of cuban drug criminals but that whole element of the movie was essentially pointless like the cubans give him [ __ ] and they threaten his life because he’s not taking care of frank castle but all of a sudden they just stop the whole element never really comes back into play in the movie and you think it would have come into play later where like frank maybe had to deal with the cuban mob since he was responsible for their financial losses but nothing yeah john travolta’s character basically says like i’ve got more guns than you go away and then they do they’re like oh okay yeah yeah i’ll just leave now yeah at least he was upfront about it i feel like john travolta was very much a throwaway character it was insert bad guy a who’s the head of the crime family here which is sad because he can be a very a very good villain and you saw some of it i feel like the movie could have been so much more starting street level i mean just starting from the fact that frank castle coming to the cops like as soon as he comes back that was a terrible idea and it made no sense right in front of the press i mean he could have started off knocking off the cubans moving his way up the chain and howard saint being that last great kill but then you know the ending instead of him you know looking down at his chest which totally made sense for the punisher you know sniping the cuban brothers you know that would have been a great ending of the film but yeah it was a lot of like weird storylines that felt like they were probably like third or fourth editions of the draft yeah a lot of dangling threads in this movie i will say that the extended edition of the film does pick some of those up not in regards to the cubans but in regards to his partner jimmy weeks and there’s actually a pretty dark scene where he gets his partner to kill himself but that wasn’t included in the theatrical cut which is unfortunate the special edition had an alternate opening as well right and it was all completely illustrated by tim bradstreet yeah who did the punisher covers at the time it wasn’t particularly well done animation it looked like a bunch of paper dolls moving across the screen so uh yeah i wasn’t impressed by that at all but it was a scene where you see the punisher in afghanistan i think and he saved his entire unit that was captured on his own so it was an interesting story but it was almost hard to enjoy because the animation was so lacking i think they did that because that was originally in the script but they didn’t have the budget for it right like the studio kept pulling funding for this film so it was made on on a tiny tiny budget i don’t know the exact number but it was it was small and it only had like a  shooting schedule i think which is insane but uh it’s disappointing to have this adaptation from mcgarth and his storyline and not have an interesting villain because one of the things that garth ennis does best is present these total wackos for frank castle to go up against i think they did kind of a piss-poor job of adapting garth ennis’s source material especially when it came to frank castle’s neighbors uh joan the mouse backer dave and mr bumpo i felt like they were so unnecessary in this film and they really give the movie this weird tonal shift like there are certain ways to come at the character of frank castle you have your straightforward gritty crime stories like the 90s punisher war zone comics you have your deeply personal character studies like punisher war journal and then you have like the over-the-top garth ennis marvel knights book the punisher netflix series and the punisher war zone film to their credit they picked a tone and they stuck with it they knew what they were trying to be but this 2004 punisher film it took multiple approaches from silly to somber to harrowing it makes the film completely off balance and then occasionally you get like a musical interlude oh my god the hairy hex scene what the [ __ ] was that okay you guys might [ __ ] on that but that’s gonna be played at my funeral all right i i love that song that and broken are two that are still on my playlist at this time of the film the score i thought was actually really good because you can still like it’ll take you back to that punisher theme from the opening credits to like okay that’s the punisher or you know broken because it was played so many times on mtv and vh1 back in the day yeah i did buy the soundtrack to this film i remember enjoying it it’s a little bit dated now but i have to say that i didn’t really like the score too much it kind of took me out of the film because of how brassy and pompous it was whereas i was hoping it would be a little bit more gritty and badass something more like the dark knight score or something like that yeah usually when i think of the punisher i don’t think of like a brass section i think of like an electric guitar kind of thing you know i can appreciate this score i do think that it was not always appropriate for the punisher in some areas especially like right before the end fight i like i really wanted something hardcore right there and it was just like this almost like triumphant kind of superman-esque brass riff that we got yeah he’s like my actions are not vengeance they’re punishment doo doo like it was a very 90s type musical score i think and that’s like out of all the different approaches that the film took it baffles me that it appears that their primary approach was to make a shitty  it was hensley’s intent to make a throwback to old school revenge movies of the 70s like get carter or death wish and also toss in these neo-western elements from sam pekinpop films like the wild bunch but to me this movie was the superhero equivalent of like a steven seagal flick except with less action the all this movie was missing was puns there were no really good puns well john travolta did say that you know his wife took the train there was that there was that yeah she took the train and he’s wrapped up in something yeah that was a sinister little bit there that i wish they would have you know gone further with that aspect of the character honestly because i thought it was mildly amusing let’s go ahead and break down the story of this movie so from the opening credits i really thought they did a pretty good job with opening credits and the style of the animation that they did was really well done i thought it did a good job of setting the tone of what a really awesome punisher movie would be like i don’t think that the movie actually quite lived up to the animation style of these credits it was really cool especially how like the white blood dripping down from the bullet holes formed the punisher skull i remember seeing that in the theaters for the first time and just going oh man this movie movie’s gonna be awesome i really like the punisher skull insignia design for this movie i think it’s the best that the skull has ever looked um it just looks so gritty and a little bit organic but really sinister it does have that tone of don’t screw with me um i didn’t like the background they gave it in this film i don’t think they should have done that i think it should have just been this is a really awesome cool symbol and he finds it and uses it the backstory they gave it was terrible regarding yeah like his kid buying it as a t-shirt for him yeah he’s like it looks really intense have this shirt dad it wards off evil spirits does it i mean in a way it does with bullets outside of the context how would you guys feel if your kid bought you this like freaky looking t-shirt like that i’ll neither confirm nor deny that’s already happened so and when my kids did it i just immediately started looking around for exits and then also they were not allowed to go on any carousels or rides or anything they both went into a bunker [Laughter] no my daughters already know you know the punisher symbol they know it’s marvel they would never do it uh so after the opening credits we get this weapons deal gone bad where the character of bobby saint who is the son of the main villain he ends up dying in the sting operation i don’t get why punisher was all of a sudden like this thespian it made no sense to me because you know he’s a force recon guy who ended up joining the fbi as an undercover agent and i guess they just knew that he could do this german accent or they asked him to or something like that it was so bizarre dude don’t you know that frank castle was in like theater club in high school yeah right totally now i wish honestly that they had swapped sons because i’d love the douchebag kid to have been blown away in this one and not the nice kid the fact that they left that greasy slime ball of the sun around is just terrible karmatic events there was something about that actor that just it aggravated me every time he was on the [ __ ] screen i just wanted the punisher to just [ __ ] kill him already and he did have a great death scene though i have to say is pretty is pretty good holding up the mine it was definitely the most punisher of the deaths for his nemeses yeah yeah so after that scene frank goes home and he tells his son you know that they’re moving to london that he’s not gonna work undercover anymore and he’s getting a desk job and they go to a family reunion in puerto rico but meanwhile the saints they learn everything about frank and the wife olivia tells quentin glass that she wants the whole family murdered and that’s that’s a little extreme that was really [ __ ] up the whole family massacre scene when i saw in 2004 it didn’t really register with me how insanely horrific that was until i saw it again a few weeks ago that whole thing is just it’s yeah there were kids there yeah a lot of kids died a lot of grandparents died and i’m surprised they went that route i don’t think they would have done that in today’s climate i don’t think oh yeah definitely not and the guy trying to sail away on the boat which i think that was probably the the only humorous part of that entire scene is like i’m gonna get on a boat and try to sail away before the guy shoots me but yeah i feel like that was way over the top reaction and i don’t really know what that would stem from like i understand grieving and having vengeance upon you but to completely wipe an entire person’s family off the map that’s um we’ll say an indicator of psychosis absolutely absolutely it was hard enough when it was punisher’s wife and two kids that died but seeing his whole family wiped out was just it was nuts it was not easy to watch but his son and wife get run over they’re killed and punisher is nearly killed as well he’s blown off the dock in an explosion and he has a couple gunshots in him but a local fisherman manages to rescue him and nurse him back to health it was like a witch doctor yeah nursed him back to health which like a good thing it was a witch doctor because if he wasn’t there is there any way frank castle could have survived all of those gunshots to the chest not to mention he was swimming full of holes in what i could only assume what a passing by shark would find and you know he he winds up on a beach and then the one witch doctor who just so happens to be in the area nurses him back to health after being perforated i mean i appreciate a good you know wow that happened but uh yeah i’d say coincidence i think not i think the witch doctor had a hand in all of this i’m just saying most definitely most definitely i actually would have loved if frank was attacked by a shark in that scene and then all of a sudden it turned out that roy schneider was still alive and then he jumped in and then [ __ ] killed the shark by shooting an explosive in its mouth that would have been awesome so you said with his m1 it was glorious [Laughter] so castle he decides that he’s going to get revenge he says god’s going to sit this one out one of the cheesiest lines ever he goes and he finds a new apartment gets new neighbors and he kidnaps one of howard saint’s lowest lackeys mickey and he interrogates him and gets information all about howard saint and his dealings and his family during his recon frank castle learns that quentin glass is gay and he uses that in addition to livia saint’s routine of always going to the movies he uses those elements to set it up to make it look like they’re having an affair and drive howard saint jealous since he knows that howard st is insanely possessive of his wife see that that’s something that kind of stuck out with me too like mickey says oh what he possesses most is his wife okay well then he lets her go and do her nails and by herself go to movies every single week if he’s that possessive and that jealous do you not think that he would have at least two or three dudes there with her at all times you would think but he must give her like a weekly allowance of free time to herself or something like that it’s so bizarre that the whole relationship was bizarre especially the scene where like the family is murdered and then she like shows up in lingerie it’s like celebrating the death of castle’s family it was weird very strange performances i think laura haring though she is a bottle of hottie hot sauce the only person that could make rebecca romaine a little more bland is her right then we get to the part where frank castle for some reason rips up his tombstone and announces to the world that he’s back which makes no sense to me from a strategic standpoint because you know he could have used his seeming death as an advantage against his enemy idiot i’m not sure why he even had a tombstone considering like they didn’t have a body like wouldn’t there still be like an ongoing search i don’t know how long it takes before they just call it off and say you know this guy’s dead we can’t find him and only after five months the tampa bay police do a bang-up job well guys five months have passed we’ll just go ahead and close this case frank castle attacks howard saints money laundering scheme by throwing money out of the window and uh blowing up a shipment of money that was going to the cubans uh at the end of the throwing money out the window scene there was this moment where frank castle went down and he killed two of the guys that were there during the family massacre and it was so anti-climactic because i thought at this moment he was just gonna go guns blazing towards these guys but it turns into this like freaking quick draw western style shootout it was so lacking in energy and so dumb it made no sense why any of them would do that like i guess they were just sporting men or something like that it made no sense well they couldn’t wait until you know tomorrow morning at dusk five paces away and then turn you know that there was no budget for that so they decided okay well we’ll do this whole escape from la hey guys we’ll play moscow rules and then you know quick draw yeah no it does does not work and he should have like thrown an ap mine at them as he was kicking one in the face that that’d be a little bit more frank castle there you go yeah it was especially bizarre considering what you said about the colts and how you know the compensators and boring out the barrels would have made him insanely inaccurate in that shootout so i feel like what would have really happened is he would have drawn both of his guns duel wielding and he would have shot and missed both of those guys and just and then just died okay i’ll take this moment to go ahead and discount nobody duel wields literally nobody duel wields because if you really think about this if you’re trying to be accurate any further than like two feet you have to aim and there are not very many people that have chameleon eyes that can separate their eyes so that they can see both guns and firing that doesn’t happen never no not once that’s why john wick doesn’t do it oh that’s right he never does i love those movies i feel like a punisher movie done in the style of john wick would be absolute perfection indeed due to their loss of money the cubans visit howard saint you know just for reasons just to give him a threat and then not show up again frank starts his blackmail plan when he’s visited by a country western songwriter slash assassin named harry heck now in the comics harry heck only showed up for like a few panels he was like this known western gunslinger who’s famous for dodging a bullet but frank ended up mowing him down with the newsie because you know he was like he dodged a bullet he can’t dodge 30. it was really quick and hilarious but here they completely transformed the character now you say the song is good i don’t hate the song it’s fine but the fact that he shows up at this like diner and plays it for him i felt so much second-hand awkwardness on behalf of everybody involved like i think they tried to make it like cool and like menacing or something like that but to me i was just like dying from embarrassment i had the same reaction that smacker dave and uh bimbo had you know they’re just kind of like giggling after they’re like what the hell was that i i also feel like we’re jumping over the fact that frank castle was at this diner like hey guys let’s all go to the diner where rebecca romain’s character works and we’ll eat breakfast together yeah that’s not something that we would do so the fact that he was even there bothered me and then of course harry heck with his i smoke a cigarette and put it in between my pinky and my ring finger so i can strum my guitar you know that that’s country right there that was so weird i didn’t really love the subsequent gunfight either because i think it was over a little bit too quickly i did like how thomas jane outfitted his car with like those sliding panels that would block the bullets for him but he’s such a piss-poor driver after that like he was fleeing in such a hurry he flips his car it just was kind of not a great showing on behalf of the punisher i wanted him to pull out a gun but he didn’t even do that he pulled out this ballistic knife now in your experience ken have you ever seen a ballistic knife i have and yeah no nobody carries them because they’re ballistic knives and guns work better um what bothered me probably most about this whole thing was the fact that we spent like a good five minutes of a montage of watching him outfit this car and getting it ready and revving the engine for it to disappear two and a half minutes later because he flipped it trying not to hit a kid playing with a soccer ball and then he gets up after killing harry heck and he’s like i’ll just take his car and then that’s it that’s the that’s the car he uses the rest of the film it’s like everyone’s like oh that charger is on its you know and there’s a dead man right there okay we’ll just go ahead and move right past this it’s so dumb it really killed me that like all these assassins that howard saint sent after the punisher knew where he was they knew he was at the diner they knew where he lived like why didn’t howard saint just send a firing squad it made no sense thomas jane going around like standing in front of the media and stealing his tombstone and going to diners like not hiding out seemed like just bad decision-making well i was gonna say how did the russian even know where punisher lived to begin with but yeah if he’s going to diners and whatnot he’s probably easy to follow well you guys also are missing the deleted scene where there’s the guy flipping the sign like a pizzeria he’s got the punisher lives here and then you know that’s where he’s out like everywhere he’s at like hey guys he’s here don’t worry about it he’s so badass you can’t kill him you know if i was prank castle i’d been like mickey he turned on me yeah yes i did enjoy the russian fight though i thought that was really well done kevin nash i think he’s just a mountain of a man and i think he looked like a good version of the russian if you know he didn’t really act like the version from the comics in the comics the russian is kind of a motor mouth he just talks non-stop and he’s like a huge fan of like superheroes and stuff like that he’s a hilarious character and here he wasn’t hilarious in himself the fight was kind of played for laughs a little bit but i absolutely believed that he could wipe the floor with thomas jane just [ __ ] huge i did enjoy the flattening of the colt python barrel with the weight that he just kind of pulls off it’s like yeah i’ll just i’ll just flatten this and then the humerus of tom jane looking looking at the barrel going out [ __ ] yeah he totally sold the humor i think of that scene they did keep some elements from the comics of this fight like when the russian hit him with the toilet and when he was smashing his head into the refrigerator i thought that was pretty good and the punisher even ended up killing the russian using food in the comics he threw hot pizza in his face and then smothered him with mr bumpo i thought that would have been hilarious if they did that in this movie but instead you know he just pushed him down the stairs and he broke his neck in this movie john panette played mr bumpo and uh he’s a big guy but i don’t know if he’s big enough to believably smother a guy as big as kevin nash yeah i forget that ben foster played specker dave and ben foster is like a really decent actor he’s quite the chameleon it’s hard to believe that this is the same guy that played angel in x-men 3. so after the russian fight frank castle is wounded and the neighbors help him by stitching him up and hiding him in an elevator when howard saints goons show up to see if the job was done they end up interrogating spiker dave pulling out his piercings in the comics that scene was played for laughs but in this movie that was kind of hard to watch because ben foster and will patton played the scene so real it’s crazy i think what pissed me off is the fact that dave is the one that gets all torn up and at the end pimpo is like yeah i’m fine yeah well look what he did to him he’s what what the hell nobody did anything to this guy that was just like beating the [ __ ] out of this guy oh you like that you like that you like that you’re gonna say something he’s like yeah that’s fine just keep going i wouldn’t have been friends with that man no not at all like bumbo seriously couldn’t like stand up and shove that guy it’s his friend getting tortured recuperated frank castle kills one of the goons who stayed behind with a paper cutter which i thought was a pretty cool kill but then he completes his blackmail plan and gets howard saint to kill both quentin and livia despite the fact that it was kind of a dumb implausible plan the fact that it was carried out to fruition i thought was pretty good just seeing the whole howard st crime organization destroy itself from within it was still satisfying in a way yeah i think just because of the over-the-top way that howard saint killed his best friend and his wife like that was pretty brutal that was gruesome like these characters aren’t sympathetic characters you know they went off and killed entire families but it’s still pretty shocking to see how they died yeah it really showed like how much thought he put into it at this point in the film you didn’t really see that from howard saints like you just saw kind of like this businessman aspect of you know i’m a money launderer and not much else i mean he’s got the charisma of john travolta so there’s a little bit of menace to him but other than that he didn’t really see anything uh other than him shoot the dude in the leg in the very beginning there really was no menace like physical menace and then for him to kill both of them in such a brutal way was kind of one of those okay so maybe this character could have been something more had more development occurred yeah for sure howard saint gets all of his goons and assassins together at uh club and he offers a cash reward for the punisher i don’t quite know why he didn’t do this from the beginning but punisher uses this opportunity to attack everybody at the club in the best action scene in this movie i i really enjoyed the gun action that happened up in that room when he like switched from his rifle to his shotgun i didn’t think it was quite believable though that he got two point blank shotgun rounds to his chest and was still fine yeah not so much i i can tell you i’ve never been shot in the bulletproof vest but i i will say from experience on how that works yeah especially if it’s a shotgun he’d be dead it perforated right through the first round probably would have been stopped uh slightly but the impact itself would have put him out on commission because just because the bullet stops doesn’t mean all the force that comes with it stops right yeah and i was kind of surprised how like everyone was aiming right for his bulletproof vest like that’s clearly a bulletproof vest i know you’re supposed to aim for like center mass but come on aim somewhere else the guy who shot him with the shotgun considering he was that close why didn’t he aim for the head because they were well trained you always aim for center mass because if you miss then you know you miss high and you’ll hit him in the shoulder ah i did like the way that guy went out though with the knife through the mouth i thought that was pretty dope that was crazy and the knife in the hand i was gonna say i feel like that that was a little bit of an overkill the knife through the hand and then the junk and then through the brain a little uh overkill but definitely again one of the more punisher ways of killing somebody yeah punisher finishes the job by killing howard saint he uh shoots him in another draw style fashion and then uh straps him to a vehicle that he sends into a car dealership across the street that he’s rigged with a bunch of other explosives yeah he like fashioned a punisher logo with the mines i don’t think that he actually did that i think it was more the movie taking artistic license i mean if he did take the time to rig these cars in his insignia that would just be so ridiculous like i want to see the test runs that he had to do before that like okay if i hit this car see it’s the teats all screwed up we have to try again all right mickey go ahead and bring in some more cars we got to try this [ __ ] again yeah no he didn’t he didn’t do that and that was the funny thing it’s like it was very late 90s early 2000s of if you hadn’t realized you were watching a punisher movie before now there’s a punisher movie oh that’s the punisher logo i thought it was a pretty good death scene though for howard saint with the job done uh frank castle goes home and he’s about to kill himself now that the mission’s complete but he ends up deciding not to after seeing this vision of his former wife and he decides that he’s gonna spend out the rest of his days as a vigilante uh killing other criminals and operating as the punisher that does it for the film overall the movie is just so generic it tried to be you know a 70s revenge film and it ended up being a shitty 90s action film it was a little too silly a little bit too tonally disparate and lacking in action and to that end i gave the film two stars yeah i have to agree with that i think this film is so mediocre it’s probably two and a half stars in my opinion but because it’s also a punisher film it has to get knocked down half a point just because it didn’t live up to the source material it was not a good punisher film so yeah i have to agree with two stars yeah i agree with both of you uh i would i would give this uh one and a half to two stars i mean honestly i feel like it was better than dolph lundgren’s version uh in the in the late 80s early 90s but only just better um in that it actually had the punisher symbol and that he was the punisher but i i feel like this movie could have been way more faithful in the character and in that would have introduced the character to way more people and it wasn’t until much much later that he became more relatable so yeah i definitely agree with it from the military correspondent this was a terrible use of a military-esque human being what i’ll typically do with my reviews is i give my opening of whether i like the movie or not uh and even my really terrible movies uh i’ll give the reasons why i enjoy the film um and then at the end kind of give a hey you should go take a look at this or if you don’t want anything to do with it don’t go anywhere near it i would say to punisher fans if you’re a fan of the punisher don’t go anywhere near this movie yeah stick with the tv show yeah the tv show did a good job of portraying the character in the right way i think even though you know a lot of the seasons had one too many episodes i thought they were well done definitely thank you so much ken uh for joining us for this review i think you provide some really fascinating insights everybody if you have not listened yet to you call those tactics be sure to go check out that show one of the things that surprised me was that i was such a huge fan of the hurt locker the movie and then i heard your review of it and now i can never look at that film the same way again right well i take that as a huge compliment uh yeah that is the most hated military film on earth for military folks uh and that was the reason why i chose that as my first film uh it didn’t even take research like i could go back to the moment i saw that uh sitting in a theater at fort benning georgia in the late 2000s and remember everything in excruciating detail of how bad that film really was so if i can forestall or change people’s views on how good so-called this film was just because it got an academy award uh i i take that as great umbrage and i will take that to my grave probably put it on my tombstone uh that i changed people’s minds on how shitty that film was um but yeah no i i really appreciate you guys having me on uh i’ve like said i’ve listened to you guys uh since the beginning before you guys were dynamic duel when you guys were still the battle cast so please keep rocking that and like i said guys i really appreciate you having me on thanks for coming on our show ken and uh we’ll have to have you on for like when we review punisher war zone as well or really you know it doesn’t have to be a military movie uh we’ll probably have you on for a dc film that would be great every once in a while it’d be nice that you guys actually do a good dc film uh looking at you jonathan you’re not repping us very well i only have a specific selection like batman and robin had to tie into mr freeze you know yeah maybe we’ll bring you on board for uh the dark knight raises because i think that’s like the last good film that dc has left you know we haven’t reviewed calm down fans four stick [Laughter] yeah i’m in the same boat alright talk to you later ken all right talk to you guys later i feel like he gave so much better of an analysis of this film that we could ever hope to give yeah it’s always hard when you’re reviewing a film that you don’t like but i think that ken definitely saved this episode with his thoughtful analysis he’s a great insightful guy guys if you’re interested in movies or history or even military tactics be sure to check out his show you call those tactics which you can find on any podcasting app we’ll be linking to his show in our show notes for this episode let us know what you thought about the punisher 2004 movie by writing to us at dynamicduelpodcast gmail.com or by visiting us on facebook instagram or twitter you can find links to all of our accounts by visiting our website dynamicduel.com and on our site you can also find a link to our patreon page where we offer bonus content and our very own marvel vs dc card game called dynamic duel war and also on dynamicduel.com is a link to our merch store where we sell t-shirts hoodies stickers and more with our dynamic duel no prize artwork and who are you drawing this week jonathan um i’m actually going to draw a gambit because our next episode will be a duel between him and captain boomerang the flash villain from the suicide squad right now why are we putting those two against each other well they’re both popular characters who throw explosive [ __ ] exactly that that’s it and they’re both master thieves so uh we think it’ll be a fun episode check us out for that next week uh we want to remind everyone to please subscribe to our show if you haven’t or please leave a rating or review on your platform of choice sharing this show on social media or in person is also a big help for us but that does it for this episode we want to give a big thanks to our executive producers ken johnson who we want to give an extra special thanks for on this episode particularly for being our guest and also jace krump john storowski john spees isaiah bethune zachary hepburn and john betchinina for helping make this podcast possible and we’ll talk to you guys next week up up and away true believers