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Review and Issues Surrounding Marvel's The Punisher

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What you will see on Netflix this Friday.

Yesterday the whole social web erupted with multitudes of preliminary reviews of The Punisher. And for the most part all of them were really good to great reviews. For example these 2 reviews that highly praise the show.

From Variety – In all, “The Punisher” is not just satisfying but surprising — an interpretation of Netflix and Marvel’s tried-and-true partnership that offers more depth and challenges to the audience than even the gritty world of “Marvel’s Jessica Jones.” Free from superpowers and superheroes, the Marvel universe is more forgiving — and more interesting. Of course, the slightly cartoony Marvel Cinematic Universe is still a world where people named Carson Wolf show up and act as if they are not obviously villains. But “The Punisher’s” place in it is a welcome morass of thorny questions and unresolvable answers. At least in this part of the television landscape, there is room for another antihero.

From Forbes – By ignoring the craziness that’s gone down in the Netflix corner of the MCU in recent months, Punisher builds a world all its own full of CIA cover-ups, NSA investigations, and frenemies who are so ready to go to war with one other. The Punisher is the show Marvel Television needed. It’s the show that proves there might just be hope yet for the studio’s small screen ambitions. And yes, if we’re judging purely on the act of transforming into a character, Bernthal absolutely deserves an Emmy nomination for this one. His performance has been far elevated from the days of Daredevil.

Here’s a few I read that were very critical of the show while highly praising Jon Bernthal’s star studded performance.

From UPROXX – It’s a conundrum: The Punisher is most effective when its title character is indiscriminately slaughtering his foes, but that’s also when it most consistently evokes the kinds of real-life horrors that pushed the premiere back once, and could have kept pushing it back indefinitely. There may hopefully be a time when Frank’s actions don’t instantly recall horrors from our world, but that version of his story will still need to be told much more compellingly than this.

From Indiewire – For a show which seemed, given the timing of its launch, to be so controversial, its most controversial element is its lack of controversy. Frank Castle does some bad things, but nothing as bad as what happens in America on a regular basis. As a narrative about veterans trying to find their place in the world, “The Punisher” has something to say. But it could have been so much shorter, and its placement in the Marvel universe feels tangential at best.

And of course there are others I’m not going to bother reading let alone posting them because they are saturated with politics and pure ignorance of who the character really is and why he really does this. It’s obvious that those who post such crappy articles never read the comics or delve into some serious research about the character. They just see him and assume that he’s just a guy with guns going around killing people and that he’s a bad influence on everybody.
One incredibly bad article about Punisher from i09.com suggests that the show should be canceled because of what happened in Las Vegas in Early October when a gunman used fully automatic weapons to kill over 50 people and injuring 500 others during a country music concert event.
Weeks later another mass shooting took place. This time in Sutherland Springs, Texas where a gunman, with a history of domestic violence, came in and shot up a whole church, killing 26 and injuring 20 more. These 2 men both ended up taking their own lives before the Law had a chance to get their hands on them.
With these 2 incidents and 900+ more shootings occurring between those 2 events, it’s important for this country to set up and pass much stricter gun control laws so that there won’t be any more of such incidents happening again.
But sorry. Cancelling Punisher and all other shows that contain gun violence such as Die Hard, LA Law, and NCIS won’t work in preventing such crimes from happening again. According to Jon Bernthal, The Real True Punisher, the show will delve into the issue of gun violence and address two sides of the issue.

“The best thing that art can do is to be a to mirror society and reflect what’s going and make you ask questions, force you to ask questions, not necessarily try to answer them. One thing that the show does, and talking to Steve [Lightfoot] I’m not even sure whether he did this on purpose or not, Steve’s the writer, but I really think that there’s nothing preachy about this show and I think all sides of the argument are sort of explored in it. Look let’s be honest we put off the premiere of this show because of gun violence in this country, and now the night of the premiere there’s been another bout of it. There’s been 900 gun deaths since Vegas. There’s clearly an issue, we clearly have a problem. And what we need immediately is some open dialogue on it.”

It’s not easy to discuss issues involving gun control without upsetting those who prefer to live without guns and those who want to keep guns and have it easy for them to buy military style guns while zealously defending the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution. But the show will try to deal with both sides of the issue along with dealing heavily with the issue of what war veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder deal with when they return home from serving their tours in the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
Frank is no exception to dealing with PTSD which he got from witnessing his family getting gunned down in cold blood. In fact his way of dealing with PTSD is going after and destroying all those who murdered his family like he did in Daredevil Season 2 last year. But now this coming Friday he will have to do more killing, vengeance, and punishing when he faces off against ANVIL and the corrupt members of the CIA, who duped Frank into becoming a lowly hitman that lead to the senseless killing of his family, and destroy them all!

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From Avenging Spider-Man #6 Art by Mark Waid and Marco Checchetto. Follow them both on Twitter 🙂

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He's very pleased with the harp's sound.
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Frank’s very pleased with the harp’s sound.

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