For some reason I remember Inside Man as not being too jarring, but I’ve heard it discussed as a film in which Lee compromised himself, even as it’s a pretty good one.

Prey’s my #1, partly because we’re constantly starved for considered sci-fi, let alone sci-fi horror (which is my favorite thing), but also because it’s looking to be the swan song of big-budget immersive sim gaming. A good way to go out, I suppose.

He could definitely work as a part-time / side player in another series (sort of how Hulk is in the MCU now). But I can’t see him as the Punisher, the crusading vigilante. With this actor and this story I can only see him as someone who’s not only left that life but doesn’t want to return to it.

Funny that the least promising Marvel show turned out to be, arguably, its best one.

This episode was one where they slipped back into Ray Donovan mode, though in Ray Donovan’s defense the dead wife was a developed character (as much as a Ray Donovan character can be, at least). And man it felt about as pulse-pounding as a Ray Donovan episode.

Very true to life, in my case

If he’s built a loyalty to Frank it can be made to work, but it’d be a tall order, and it’d be hard to pull off without alienating him from the family he fought so hard to get back. But afaik, that’s something that happened in the comics, so there’s precedent, and it would be thematically resonant if PTSD and not…

That’s all true but it feels like the video itself is meant as a more murderous echo of Abu Ghraib, which seems like it already did the damage Cerberus would conceivably do

One of the recurring issues with the Netflix Marvel shows has been that the heroes often don’t have a firm and stated reason for doing what they do, they tend to sit and exist and wait for plot to happen to them - the closest thing to a counter to this was Daredevil’s addiction metaphor. Punisher doesn’t have that…

Two things that bugged are (1) that Rawlins’ ass-covering plan to sell out Billy doesn’t seem to come up again, which means I don’t know why that scene was there, and (2) I don’t know if the “setting foreign policy back by 10 years thing” is intentionally put in there or the writers just forgot that we’ve been in…

Even in a comic book world, having a senator murdered would write a whole lot of plot checks the show can’t really cash. The law enforcement machine would have gone into unstoppable motion (I mean, it should have with the bombings, but whatever) and there would be no daylight at all for any character sympathetic to…

Going back over the show without that “where is this going?” tension, Madani really is sort of pointless. There’s so little character grounding for her beyond “agent who wants it more than her bosses” archetypes.

Curtis ain’t dumb, though. It’s like the oldest veiled threat in the book

Idk, I’m reminded of when Frank sent Micro on the snipe hunt and then Curtis tells him to stay away or Frank will “pay Sarah a visit”. Was that actually an empty threat from Frank? And more to the point, is Curtis that good at compartmentalizing or is he just totally cool with threatening a man’s family for reasons he…

That’s sort of Marvel in general, though. Just about every movie franchise aside from Thor (uncoindentally, the best one) explicitly references some real world issue and proceeds to take an extremely muddled position.

I don’t disagree with the conclusions of the review, but it could be a lot worse. The comics tended to lean into the Punisher’s mania for adding any and every criminal to his kill list, making him essentially a serial killer, whether that was to make him seem badass to teen boys or to provide opportunities for black…

This was the point from which I referred to Billy exclusively as “Assassin’s Creed”.

I’m not sure how the show wants us to see the relationship b/w Lewis and his father. You don’t get the sense that the father’s malevolent, certainly, but I don’t know if we’re meant to read him as being misguided or just ineffectual. The scene where they watch the boxing match has him continually out of focus as he…

He might have been asked to leave but my limited knowledge of support groups is that actually throwing someone out is a pretty drastic sort of action. PTSD sufferers can be antagonistic. They can also be paranoid. It’s a pretty high bar, when your group is meant to be a safe space for everyone, to say that someone…

1. You’ve never met a cop who didn’t know you?