Netflix’s Punisher would be timely if it had anything coherent to say about gun violence

A character invented as a villain has become a hero, and an unexamined killer in an age where nuance is important..

It’s hard to imagine a worse time for a Punisher TV show. A little over a month after one of the worst mass murders in American history, in a country where mass shootings come at the rate of roughly one per day, the arrival of Marvel Comics’ favorite gun-wielding, spree-killing angry white man on Netflix is awkward, to say the least.

The Punisher has always been an antihero, a not-quite-good guy with a gun whose motivation for murder is initially sympathetic: bad guys killed his family, and justice has to be dispensed. When the Netflix series begins, however, he’s fresh from completing his quest for vengeance, and everyone on his original hit list is pushing daisies. If this were a movie, we’d be at the end, and it’d be time for Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) to put the guns down, get a lot of therapy, and move on with his life. But he can’t, because then Netflix and Marvel wouldn’t have a show, so he has to keep killing.

To their minor credit, showrunner Steve Lightfoot (a Hannibal writer-producer) and his team are smart enough to realize they have to say something about gun violence. Unfortunately, they never quite figure out what that should be.

Like numerous first-person shooter games that punch above their weight class, The Punisher tries to transcend its glorified violence by glazing the story with a thin sheen of social consciousness. It feints at addressing issues like PTSD, making America great again, and the experiences of veterans returning from war zones abroad. One of Castle’s friends, Billy Russo (Ben Barnes) sets up Blackwater-esque military contracts; another, Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore), runs a support group for veterans. But the show never reckons with deeper issues so much as it mentions them between fight scenes. It’s like tossing a thinking-face emoji into a gun fight, and hoping it comes across as self-aware and wise. It doesn’t. No matter how many sad faces Frank Castle makes about his trauma, The Punisher can never escape the terrible gravity that its most basic purpose is inviting viewers to enjoy watching an angry man murder as many people as he can.

It’s impossible to divorce The Punisher from guns; they are his costume, his origin story, his superpower. Lightfoot and his directors know this: the opening credits start with a slow-motion shot of a bullet firing, smoke billowing out from the barrel as the camera caresses the contours of various guns with an almost-pornographic delight. For those who might be slow on the uptake, the credits conclude with an arsenal of weapons slowly coalescing into the Punisher’s infamous skull logo. The Punisher equals guns. Got it.

This time around, Frank’s targets are corrupt military officials who are covering up war crimes in Afghanistan, like the so-called Agent Orange (Paul Schulze). The shadowy conspiracy spirals out to envelop former NSA analyst David Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Homeland Security agent Dina Madani (Amber Rose Revah) and everyone’s favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe journalist, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll).