HE'S already featured in three not so great movies: now Marvel's brooding vigilante The Punisher gets the TV treatment courtesy of Netflix.
Available to view from today, the new series casts Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead) as bereaved super soldier turned avenging force, Frank Castle, who earns his descriptive nickname The Punisher by waging a one man war on organised crime.
Why? Crooks wiped out his family, see, and so crooks is gonna pay. Even the ones who had nothing to do with it.
The opening episode makes for an effective attention getter, as the emotionally shut-down (and presumed dead) Castle comes to terms with how avenging his loved ones in an ultra-violent manner hasn't erased the pain of loss – though it has brought him to the attention of intrepid Homeland Security agent Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah) and the more sympathetic ex-NSA analyst David 'Micro' Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).
Having switched identities and traded his guns for a sledgehammer, Castle numbs himself down with hours of smashing walls on a building site before retiring to a one room bolthole to eat tuna from the can and read Moby Dick.
However, crime just won't stay out of Castle's way – he's soon back to dispensing bullet-riddled blood-spurting justice as The Punisher.
Bernthal gives good 'grief-wracked war machine', and the series effectively updates the Vietnam-era angst of the original comics to a 21st century 'war on terror' setting.
A treat for Punisher fans, which should also appeal to those with an appetite for violent revenge fantasies who've been left cold by other Marvel/Netflix outings like Iron Fist.
:: Netflix.com
