punisher

Kombating Mortals and More

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Mortal Kombat II

Good Morning, Folks. With my brain as muddled as it currently is, I have spent quite a bit more time watching media than I normally do. This morning, I thought I would talk a bit about some of the things that I have watched recently. In 2021, we got an update to the Mortal Kombat franchise that took into account a lot of the changes that have been made since the first movie came out in the 90s. It was a bit of a reboot of the entire movie franchise, and this year, we got the official sequel that builds directly upon that 2021 movie. I’m always a bit hesitant when I sit down to watch a video game adaptation, but this movie was a heck of a lot of fun. Was it high-brow theater? Hell no. Did it drop constant references to the franchise as a whole and make it fun? Heck yes.

The real winner of the movie, though, was Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. Cage is that character that you love to hate… but also secretly love, and he has been that way since the first game. Urban nails the role of Cage so perfectly, and I say this as someone who has never watched The Boys, so I have no frame of reference to his Butcher character. Truth be told, I have pretty much liked Urban in every role he has played. I even liked him as Bones in the Star Trek reboot series. Back to Mortal Kombat II however, if you have ever been a fan of the game series, I highly suggest this movie. Especially if you have played any of the more recent outings where they tweaked the core storyline a bit. The only thing that was missing that I would have liked to have seen was Reptile. We did get a great version of Baraka, which has been one of my favorite characters since the second game in the 90s.

Daredevil Born Again Season 2

I also finished Daredevil Born Again season two, and it was a bit of a mixed bag. So much of that season is so oppressive and keeps Daredevil from getting to be Daredevil. That said it is all building to something pretty great, and when that happens in the last few episodes, it becomes a pretty phenomenal series. The longer I have sat with the conclusion to this series, the more I have appreciated it. I was not fully on board as I was watching this show, and I complained a bit on social media about it. However, they nailed the landing big time. It is going to be a bit of a chore to get through those first episodes, or at least it was for me. Right now we live in a real world where everything is going wrong…. so to watch a show where things keep going from bad to worse is a bit of a large ask at the moment. The payoff really does make it worth the effort.

The Punisher: One Last Kill

Unfortunately, we are ending on a bit of a downer. I have loved The Punisher since I bought my first episode of Spiderman that featured him, which I found in a thrift store in the 80s. I was there for the limited run comic, the standard series, and even War Zone. Probably my favorite version of the character comes from the youtube short Dirty Laundry, featuring Thomas Jane. That said, my second favorite is the Jon Berenthal version, but unfortunately, One Last Kill is a fucking mess. This is one of the more confusing projects that I have seen… it is being released like it is a movie, but it is only around 45 minutes in total runtime. It feels like the first episode of a television series, but there is no more of it coming as far as I am aware. Maybe this was a teaser for the next Punisher series, setting up the key conflict… but what we get is mostly a bunch of gunplay pornography without a satisfying climax. I do not recommend it, because you will only come away unsatisfied, I fear.

Other than that, I have been catching up on Frieren Season Two and watching a lot of Regular Show. I had never watched the series from start to finish, and I find Regular Show just about the perfect comfort television to have on in the background. It was always something that I enjoyed, but I only really caught episodes out of order while watching Cartoon Network, as they replayed past episodes. At some point, I will probably go through my backlog of movies, and for those who are interested, I have been reviewing what I watch over on Letterboxd. That essentially has been what I have been up to in my media viewing habits. If you have any strong opinions that conflict with mine, feel free to post them below. I read every comment, I just don’t always respond to them.

Good TV Bad TV

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Fear Season 2

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Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead.  I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since.  Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work.  This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with.  So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise.  That said…  season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least.  It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to.  I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise.  As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like…  are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand…  the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb.  Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous.  They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous.  It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned.  It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background.  I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet.  Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously.  I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t.  I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights.  That said…  so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

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As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two.  While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable.  This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics.  Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one.  I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect.  There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers.  The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon.  From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it.  While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher.  “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled…  that is until Rick himself started to fill that role.  Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher,  and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series.  As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil…  so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin.  I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate.  As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept.  The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand.  Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast.  So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction.  Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.