The Punisher (2004)

In the quaint, sun-drenched town of Pastryville, Frank Castle, once known to the public as the notorious "Punisher", has hung up his guns for an apron and traded in the skull and kevlar armor for a smile and a rolling pin. After a life-altering incident involving a misadventure with a down on his luck pastry chef, Frank unexpectedly finds himself the owner of "Castle's Cakes", a bakery that becomes the very soul of the community. Gone are the days of vengeance - now Frank's only 'war' is the war within himself to bake the perfect croissant...

...or not. I mean, I'd probably put down money before you could blink an eye to see a story where my favorite comic book character did something as ridiculous as become a pastry chef, but alas, we're actually here today to talk about author D.A. Stern's novelization of the 2004 film The Punisher starring Tom Jane as the eponymous gun enthusiast himself. The actual plot of this story is every single Punisher origin you've ever known about: bad guys kill Frank Castle's family - Frank Castle goes on murderous rampage against any and all bad guys - the end. For the 2004 film, screenwriter/director Jonathan Hensleigh made some... changes to the lore and the overall setting, including moving the action from the gritty streets of New York City to... Tampa. Yeaaah. Tell me your film project is trying to save money without telling me your film project is trying to save money.

Hensleigh also made sure to exclude characters like Microchip and Jigsaw because he saw them as "lacking the spirit of the urban vigilante". This tells me Hensleigh didn't actually 'get' fuck-all about the comics, because while the Punisher's roots are undoubtedly part of that 1970's Mack Bolan/Death Wish stew, there's just as much of a place for high-tech Bond style gadgets and over the top supervillains in the Punisher's universe. It is a comic book property, after all. As such, the 2004 film suffered from being turned into a mostly by-the-numbers 1970's style revenger flick. Tom Jane, who actually *is* a fan of the Punisher character, does his damnedest to give his performance as much of a tortured soul pathos as possible, but ultimately, the Punisher versus a fruitier than usual John Travolta as the bad guy is missing something and it's no surprise the proposed sequel was turned into Punisher: War Zone with a completely different director, writer, and lead actor several years later.

What's interesting about the novelization of The Punisher is that author D.A. Stern (aka Dave Stern) appears to be a legitimate fan of the character. If he's not a fan, he certainly fooled me, but there are enough little tweaks to what we saw on screen to convince me he's down for some Marvel style street justice. I'm not suggesting the author went beyond his mandate here in adopting the screenplay to novel format, but I get the feeling nobody was really paying too much attention to some of the flourishes Stern added to this version of the story. From minor lore things, like the acknowledgment that Castle's family are actually the Castiglione clan, to an obvious foreshadowing of Microchip about halfway through the novel:

A shame, but the contents of this particular bin would probably end up on Saint's cigarette boats later today. Envisioning this morning's operation, Castle had originally thought to deactivate the bay's sprinkler system and burn the money, but he found he didn't have the necessary computer skills. A weakness, a chink in his armor: he would have to address it at some point.

The fact that the film's director hated Frank's sidekick enough to exclude him entirely from his film tells me he probably didn't find the time to read Stern's novelization and catch the above moment. But what really convinces me this novelization flew under the radar and was simply pushed out by the publishers for an attempt at a quick buck is THIS piece of beautifully batshit nonsense early in the novel where the author is describing some of Castle's escapades as a ruthless special ops guy long before the murder of his family takes place:

Buccaneer Bay was an Orlando tourist attraction that featured the Jose Gasparilla-the world's only remaining fully rigged pirate sailing ship. Six members of Sato X, a Japanese terrorist organization, had somehow snuck weapons onto the boat, which they then used to take sixty-five innocent tourists hostage.

The group they captured, however, included a sixty-sixth person, Frank Castle, who escaped during the terrorists' assault. He'd then donned a pirate's outfit, complete with skull mask (courtesy of one of the animatronic attractions on the ride) and set about rescuing the hostages. Within an hour, the terrorists were all dead, the tourists safe and sound, and their anonymous rescuer had mysteriously vanished.

I can assure you, nothing quite so gut-bustingly AWESOME made its way into the mostly drab film version of this property.

To me, these little flourishes are enough to make the novelization of The Punisher shine and might actually make it one of those somewhat rare instances where the film novelization outshines the big screen version of the same story. I figured going into this book that it would be a curio for hardcore fans of the comic books only, but I can see a greater appeal here. I won't pretend this is anything close to high literature, but Stern's novelization ends up reading very much like one of the Bolan novels with lots of action and goons getting exactly what's coming to them, so if that's your jam, this ain't a bad read at all. Recommended.