Superhero Movie Smack Down – Round 1

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Here’s the problem with too many superheroes: they’re too freaking powerful. From Hellboy (magic hand) to Blade (near-immortal) and beyond, these guys are almost impossible to make vulnerable. Too many movies spend their entire runtime building to some elaborate situation to challenge their hero.

The result? One-dimensional Green Lantern facing off against one-dimensional Parallax. But hey, at least the CGI’s 3D.

Nolan, however, thrusts Batman into a good old-fashioned story. The typical superhero movie is filled with archetypes; the supervillain bent on world domination, the romantic interest, and the comic relief are all essential to getting to that final battle. But here, Heath Ledger’s Joker can instead be a psychopath and The Dark Knight can focus on foreshadowing and the many, many meanings of Harvey Dent’s role as Gotham’s White Knight.

These set piece scenes are strewn throughout the most original superhero film ever. There’s very little CGI here and no A-list romance (sorry, the average-looking Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn’t count), but The Dark Knight is so well told that it never matters.

And it’s all because Batman is nothing more than a man.

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Rob Roberts – The Punisher

I won’t spend much time smearing the film choices of my Unwinnable colleagues – if lame Tom Cruisy lookalike villains and 10-minute Barry Manilow musical interludes are your thing, then I wish all the best for you and Hellboy, Ethan (I hear you two can even be

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married in New York now!).

No, I’m here to write about the first Punisher (1989) film. I can’t claim that this is even remotely one of my favorite superhero movies – that distinction falls mightily upon The Dark Knight. However, Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher is absolutely the best of the three Punisher films.

Lundgren’s Frank Castle doesn’t spend half the movie drunk in his apartment, battling cartoony, over-the-top villains or dispatching thugs on the dark, gritty…I mean sunny, pleasant-looking streets of Fort Lauderdale.

The Punisher gets right to the action and Frank Castle goes right to doing what the 80s’ Punisher should do: killing mob goons and Yakuza ninja. We viewers are also spared a plodding, 45-minute character origin.

While he’s missing his signature skull shirt, he makes up for it with a plethora of skull-hilted throwing knives. And he’s got guns – not fancy, high-tech, shoot-around-the-corner gadgetry but just big, loud bullet-spewing GUNS.

The film doesn’t end on an “I’m still here to fight crime” pseudo-happy note either, as the other two films do – we leave Lundgren’s Castle much as we found him. He’s a broken man who shouldn’t exist – who doesn’t want to exist – but does exist and for no other reason than to kill bad guys.

The Punisher isn’t a grand, big-budgeted Marvel blockbuster. It’s a simple, badass Marvel one-shot showing that Frank Castle, too, is the best he is at what he does.

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