Shortly after the Columbine Massacre, Arnold Schwarzenegger decided that he was done with movies about guns. For a long period where his popularity was waning and he attempted to appeal to conservative audiences, Arnold placed a fatwa on guns in his movies. in at least three of his films, he completely avoids the use of firearms, and he’d made the decision to exclude the sight of firearms in promotional materials for his films. I mean for the love of god, in his horrible schlock fest “The 6th Day,” he keeps from killing a thug in front of his child, and walks off with the criminal lecturing him about gun violence before bringing him down off-screen!
Director Joseph Kahn basically creates the “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” of slasher movies, a movie so meta and so self-aware that a subset of audience members may be convinced this movie is actually an affirmation of the fads this movie tackles. I imagine some folks will smile thinking “He really gets us” while Kahn is pointing and laughing at them in the background. Kahn seems to have little respect or regard for people in to fads and spends most of the movie skewering just about everyone in this odd vacuum of cyclical nostalgia and retro crap with a modern age lacking an actual identity of its own. “Detention” is a film that many movie fans will either love or hate. I often fell in to the category of despising it but also kept dabbling in the area of admiration for being so unpredictable and original.
I love 2004’s iteration of “The Punisher” starring Thomas Jane as Frank Castle also known as The Punisher. It’s a slow boiled crime thriller that eventually transforms in to a chaotic bloodbath with seemingly no limits on its cruelty. And it also has an admirable demented sense of humor. After 2004’s film, Thomas Jane dropped out of the role after a brouhaha with the studios and their direction toward the sequel that was apparently so bad and or radical that Jane just couldn’t abide by it. But since then many fans have argued that Thomas Jane’s performance of Frank Castle is the definitive cinematic performance of the character and his turn as Castle was admirable. It was layered, tragic, searing, bold, and genuine.