The sad news of the death of ray stevenson is leading to much vindication of ‘Punisher 2: War Zone’, the wild movie he starred in in 2008. Then he had to replace Thomas Jane giving life to Frank Castle, but the truth is that this Marvel character had already had a brutal film adaptation in 1989 that its protagonist dolph lundgren wanted to claim
The point is that ‘The Punisher (Avenger)’ was born almost doomed, since confidence in Marvel’s adaptations was in tatters after the enormous failure of ‘Howard, a new hero’ three years earlier. In fact, it was also in 1986 when the company New World bought Marvel Entertainment Groupselling it at the beginning of 1989, but only part of it, since the company kept Marvel Productions and the film starring Lundgren was his big bet of the year.
“It was risky”
The problem is that ‘The Punisher (Avenger)’ never made it to a theatrical release in the United States due to the delicate financial situation of New World, although in many other countries it could be seen on the big screen. However, it was quickly forgotten and now her lead has spoken about her in a talk with Film School Rejects and how times were very different back then:
I wasn’t a big fan of comics, and at the time, playing a comic book character was kind of shady. He was risky. Now, obviously, once you win the Oscar, the next thing you play is a Marvel character. That’s how it works these days.
Lundgren really enjoyed the filming, especially the fact that it was also cast, and compares his performance as Frank Castle to the one he gave as Ivan Drago in ‘Rocky IV’:
At that time I didn’t have that much experience. Rocky had done. I worked a lot with that character. He also has some internal qualms about being told what to do by the Soviet state. Drago has to kill Apollo Creed. He doesn’t want to do it, but he does it anyway. So he’d already played that once…it was something I really held onto, the fact that Frank Castle lost his family and what that would do to someone.
Of course, he regrets that New World ended up eliminating an extensive prologue that showed what was happening with the Castle family and how “became the Punisher“. Besides, Lundgren points out how the criteria have changed when choosing which interpreters to trust this type of character:
In those days, you took someone who could take off their shirt and had real muscles. Now, you take someone who has won an Oscar, you put a suit on them and they look like they have muscles. Some have real physiques, but in those days, Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Van Damme, they were really physical specimens that you could admire, not just as an actor or a character, but as a person, as a man…
Despite all the problems he had to face, New World went so far as to announce a sequel in 1990, but the project never ended up prospering.. In fact, we had to wait until 2019 to see Lundgren dressed as Frank Castle again for a photo shoot to mark the film’s 30th anniversary.
Despite everything, ‘The Punisher (Avenger)’ has not fallen into oblivion and Garth Ennisoriginal creator of ‘Preacher’ and writer of several comics starring Frank Castle, paid him the best possible compliment last year in Comic Book Couples Counseling:
It’s the most honest attempt to mirror the Punisher because – as with all the others – there’s no going back, there’s no compromise, there’s no attempt to sugarcoat it a bit and steer it away from what it so obviously is. In that movie, every time Frank pulls out a gun, he doesn’t put it away until there are a dozen dead. He never doubts.
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