Punisher MAX: Mother Russia - Part 5

[history79]

7.66 pages of 23

Comments

[reveen]

Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. When you bring the Punisher into this kind of situation, Punisher MAX stops seeming like something that can sort of maybe plausible happen and becomes pretty much the same as any other schlocky military action movie. The Punisher fights an asian martial arts mook! The Punisher stops a nuclear missile! Nick Fury beats a US military official with a belt! The Punisher threatens entire countries! It's completely divorced from MAX's selling point of gritty pseudo-reality at this point.

Not saying that it's bad. But it doesn't even look like it's trying to be a bit grounded like the rest of the series. Even Metal Gear Solid did this sort of thing more believably. The first game did at least.

[cainofdreaming]

Out of curiosity which Max series was even pseudo-realistic then?

[reveen]

I think most of it when it's dealing with mundane criminals. Not that it actually was realistic. But it kept things grounded just enough that it gave an effective illusion of realism. It starts to really break down when Punisher goes into a situation more suited for an 80s action movie.

The Slavers came after this and it had a part where Punisher was totally bushwhacked by a bunch of ex-soldier criminals because they were ready for him. Here he and the other guy are shooting up a friggin military base full of soldiers.

[cainofdreaming]

Uh, yeah. One word about that era of Punisher Max.

Barracuda.

[jeremyp]

The idea of Nick Fury as a paragon of morality is completely laughable.

I also find his alpha male strutting, whipping the generals with a belt, both ridiculous and disturbing.

[bradygirl_12]

Talk about over-the-top! It was so Gary Stu, I was laughing.

[stolisomancer]

He isn't a paragon of anything. He's a barely functional alcoholic and womanizer, who's repeatedly depicted in Ennis's MAX work as continuing with his work because it's the only thing he knows how to do.

Here, he's only moral in that he has lines he won't cross, and the generals don't. They both want to send a team in to get out with the Barbarossa weapon, but the generals have built a homegrown terrorist cell with a friendly leader in Moscow, and they pull the trigger on it as what's essentially a distraction, which comes hand in hand with the deaths of a plane full of Russian civilians. It's not merely evil; it's also inefficient, and it's a plot point in a later arc that none of the generals in that room have actually seen live combat, or they'd never have thought of it in the first place.

There's a line from James Ellroy's American Tabloid that Ennis uses to end one of the spinoffs in The Boys which also almost perfectly summarizes his Nick Fury:

"It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.

"Here's to them."

[jeremyp]

To me it feels like it is part of the continual effort to make the Punisher the marginally more sympathetic character by introducing other characters that are even worse than he is. The idea that the generals are less in touch and strategic than the intelligence agency (Fury) is a extreme stretch - in reality,it is often the intelligence agencies that fail to understand the complex consequences of their actions. For evidence of that, see Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. I'm not a good judge though - I find the character of the Punisher inherently ridiculous, and Ennis's work in general off base.

[cainofdreaming]

SHIELD's never been a regular spy agency, though. It's more of a mix with military operations and intelligence. And Fury in particular has always been heavily influenced by his origins as a boots on the ground grunt.