The Punisher Hellboy

...But why do we need the Punisher in 2004, with New York City resurgent, interest rates at historic lows, and urban crime so drastically reduced that police forces everywhere clamor for credit...

...For the Sake of the Church: Re-Thinking the Laity/Clergy Relationship - JULY 12-16...

...Discussions of clergy and laity assumptions...

...Mary's on the Lake, Lake George, NY 12845 Priesthood for the 21st Century - JUNE 21-25...

...Spurred on by his vicious wife, Saint en-acts a murderous revenge against Castle's family...

...Talk about an intrusion of grim reality...

...Commonweal 20 May 21, 2004...

...Information: kennethmcguire@cs.com , 518-796-9197...

...And his killing comes with a philosophical commentary...

...Flash forward to present-day New York and the ultrasecret Bureau for Para-normal Research and Defense, lodged in a high-modernist stone temple in, of all places, Newark...

...Unfortunately for them, what comes scooting through the portal, while red and homed, isn't the Devil, but a loveable little fellow with an over-sized stone mitt for a right hand, who craves Baby Ruth bars and longs to be cuddled...

...For a superhero he is anomalous...

...As one witty film reviewer remarked, most he-roes need a cape, but Hellboy needs a hug...

...The story follows an undercover FBI agent, Frank Castle (Tom Jane), whose sting operation against a drug-and-arms ring ends up killing the son of a moneylaundering nightclub owner, Howard Saint (John Travolta...

...The Punisher opens with a high-speed montage of images from the Marvel Comics original, with a slo-mo hail of bullets and shell casings triggering a black-and-white seep of blood that melts into the skyline silhouette of (it turns out) Tampa...

...relevance lies not in crimefighting, but in crimefighting's military cousin...

...When we first see the palatial Saint residence, the mansion fairly vibrates with vile South Florida extravagance, as the soundtrack plays ominously along...

...With these pronouncements a steely-jawed, heavily armed man takes brutal action to punish "the evildoers" for spilling innocent American blood...

...No ringing pronouncements about justice here, just the daily heroism of the American working man, who gets the job done even when it's dirty and unglamorous...

...Castle, we learn, is a Special Forces veteran, and with his chiseled GI-Joe face, dangling dog tags and cut physique he looks every bit the part...

...Comics establish a zone in which morality can be drawn with, well, comic-book clarity, and villainy relished for its dire purity...

...Other scenes take off on Westerns, like a face-off in a corporate office building that pits Castle against two thugs, all three in greatcoats, fingers twitching on their holsters...

...And the violence plays along...

...Paul Lakeland, PhD...

...Like the Punisher, Hellboy is an unlikely superhero, but in the opposite way—a sweet-souled, if brash-talking,adolescent, lost inside a massive muscled frame...

...When we see Castle relaxing in a Caribbean paradise with his family ("You and I," his wife coos, "we're blessed"), we know whatis coming...

...A grim realism keeps dragging his movie down, and an undercurrent of nastiness grows gooier as the bodies float past...

...My guess is that the Punisher's new T Commonweal 19 May 21, 2004 RETREATS FOR PRIESTS DURING JUNE AND JULY at St...

...Where Punisher traces to the curdled disaffection of the 1970s, the character of Hellboy looks back to an earlier, far more optimistic era...

...In his locked under-ground apartment at the Bureau, he sits eating vast quantities of nachos and pan-cakes, listening to Al Green, and penning hopeless love notes to Liz...

...Every morning Hellboy takes an electric grinder to his horns—"he files them," an FBI agent ex-plains, "to fit in...

...And while recent movies made from comics (and graphic novels) include such offbeat productions as Ghost World and American Splendor, the bigger productions—The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil—continue to stake out the classic American terrain where sci-fi meets action hero...

...Rev...

...And when it does, it's awful, a beachfront massacre portrayed in horrific detail...

...After dispatching the beast with weary revulsion—just doing his job, he insists—he grabs a six-pack of Bud and heads out to woo Liz yet again...

...Those who do evil to others...will come to know me well...

...Yet in addition to providing a vehicle for digital wizardry, comics offer us a view of our collective self, revealing the underlying urgencies of the moment...

...Sometimes the law is inadequate," he muses, "and you have to act outside it...

...Mignola has called the Hellboy persona a tribute to his father, a builder who would come home bleeding from a work-place accident and shrug it off with a bluff, "Oh yeah, I got my hand stuck in a machine...

...Later on, Saint convenes a conference of hit men, and they're dressed all in black and wearing dark sunglasses...

...He is the American man at midcentury—the big lug of a GI, whose brash humor posed American innocence against fascism, facing evil's demand to capitulate and shouting back, Nuts...

...Such tongue-in-cheek stylizations could be enjoyable, but director Jonathan Hensleigh isn't out for humor...

...Near the end of WWII, as GIs close in, a team of fanatical Nazis joins up with the Russian monk Rasputin—it seems he never really died—in a last-ditch hitech attempt to open a portal to hell and unleash some monstrosity to save theday for evil...

...This was an American archetype in whom strength was tempered by deep gentleness, and violence arose as a reluctant last resort...

...Rechristened in blood as the Punisher, Castle returns the violence visited upon his family ten-fold, using every imaginable weapon to slice, puncture, scald, scalp, garrot, and skewer the bad guys...

...Models of Discipleship for Priestly Spirituality - JUNE 28-JULY 2. Rev...

...he possesses no super powers, just courage, a vast arsenal of weapons, and an annihilating rage to kill...

...Hensleigh captures these torments with the relentless solemnity of a pornographer, earnestly fixated on the money shots, so that by film's end, when the apocalyptic urban firestorm Castle has ignited morphs surreally into the skull shape of the Punisher logo, it's a shock to recall that we're in a comic...

...They vented an ugly feeling of middle-class rage: at inflation's bankrupting of the American dream...

...They're either the most audacious group of villains ever assembled, or the editorial staff of Tina Brown's latest magazine...

...Maybe this explains why audiences have warmed so to Hellboy: in him we hear the echo of our best self...

...Director del Toro has shrewdly mined the dark gothic expressionism of Mignola's comic with counter-charges of irreverence and fun...

...They include a friendly fish-man named Abe (Doug Jones), and the pyrotelekinetic Liz (Selma Blair), a sultry cutie who bursts into flame when provoked, and for whom Hellboy, well, has the hots...

...W hat a relief, then, to relax back into Hellboy, Guillermo del Toro's sympathetic adaptation of the Dark Horse comic spawned in the mind of Mike Mignola...

...When faced with a fiendish hound of hell unloosed by Rasputin, a slavering creature resembling a cross between a Gorgon and a giant squid, who moreover has just finished munching a bushel of security guards, Hellboy toss-es off a spry taunt: "Hey Stinky—kitchen's dosed...

...The remainder of the movie is devoted to ecstasies of vengeance...

...Hellboy, the GIs who find him fondly christen him...

...James Keenan, SJ, Our Lives, Our Ministry, Our Rights and Our Sexuality...

...Also A Perfect Place for a Personal Retreat...

...Lawrence Boadt, CSP, Key Scriptural terminology and characters which help to enrich our lives and ministry...

...Hellboy takes us to extravagant places of doom replete with giant geared contraptions, blazing electromagnetic whirligigs, and daggers that shoot out from walls and floors: a haunted-house look that is pure fun...

...The original Punisher comic dates to 1974, hey-day of the Charles Bronson Death Wish films—urban revenge movies in which Bronson's mild-mannered architect be-comes a remorseless vigilante after his family is slaughtered by thugs—and the setup here is identical...

...It's a terrain where wildly diver-gent evocations of American maleness under duress focus a question as timely now as ever: Who are we when we resort to violence...

...When the seemingly unkillable Rasputin and his mysteriously reconstituted Nazi pals show up for more, Hellboy and company are called upon to give it to them...

...at the parlous condition of the cities and law enforcement's haplessness in the face of violent urban crime...

...Here Hellboy him-self (Ron Perlman), now almost sixty—in demon years, apparently, still just a young guy—lives with his father figure and discoverer, the aged Professor Trevor Broom (John Hurt), and a motley crew of other fantastic beings whose existence the government denies even as it avails itself of their help in fighting evil...

...From a distance of thirty years, it's easy to see what the Death Wish movies of the 1970s were about...

...Author of Postmodernity, Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age, and The Liberation of the Laity, in Search for an Accountable Church...

...The occult origins of the tale lie in a fantastic collaboration of evil...

...If you want peace, prepare for war...