I say Johnny Messner (Running Scared) should be cast as Punisher, say in five years when somebody decides to give the franchise another try.

For those who haven’t seen Green Street Hooligans, I saw it last night. AWFUL! It was a poor man’s Fight Club, though nowhere near as smart or entertaning. Elijah Woods plays the Edward Norton part (an unfulfilled collegiate who has never been a fist-fight in his whole life, and is basically a wuss and has no relationship with his father, just like Fight Club) and the Brad Pitt/Tyler Durden part is played by Justin Hunnam, a charasmatic iconoclast (though he comes off more as a slacker who thinks his slacking is so cool) who draws in some spineless loser with his ultra-laid back manner, and his “I dont’ give a F*ck about anything” attitude. He rebels against…just about everything, except fighting, which seems to be his whole reason for existence.
movies.IGN.com asker Lexi Alexander why her film felt so much like Fight Club. Her repsonse:
“I don’t like that comparison personally because I felt Fight Club had no meaning and no message other than that we’re becoming a materialistic generation. I just felt that my film was supposed to have a bigger meaning than just a bunch of guys hitting their heads. It’s more about why do young men feel tribal and have certain tribal instincts? Why do they turn to gangs? Why do they turn to violence? It has a little bit of a deeper moral and message to it than Fight Club has.”

What an arrogant bitch! GSH was about as deep as a puddle of piss, and stank just as bad. It gave NO insight into why young men join gangs, indeed the movie celebrates the trend, with no analysis of it whatsoever. As for males being “tribal” there’s equally no analysis of that. And depth? Don’t ask.
GSH had Amateur Effort written all over it. Fight Club was made by a veteran director, two skilled writers in Chuck Pahliniuk, whose novels it was based on, and Jim Uhls, who did a brilliant job of writing the script. Every single character was dynamic and memorable, the story fresh and original and best of all, you can watch it over and over without getting bored. The movie evolved more in two hours than most epics do in four.
The Tyler Durden speech where he explains “We’ve all been brought up to believe we’re going to become movie stars and rock gods one day…but we’re not,” is the best damned iconoclast speech I’ve ever heard from a movie anti-hereo. And what does Lexi’s bad-boy do? He says “F*ck-all,” every other line. Wow, what depth! What brains! What originality! What utter bullsh*t!

Not surprisingly, the movie ends much like Fight Club did but it didn’t matter because the whole damned premise was f*cking absurd. Come on, a movie about a bunch of soccer (oops, I mean “football”) thugs who form gangs in the honor of their favorite teams and then go about brawling with other gangs formed about other teams? And rather than the police being all over them they march freely through the streets with police escort and are local celebrities, getting girls phone numbers and write-ups in the papers. These gangs rally outside of train stations and soccer (oops, “football”) stadiums waiting to pummel each other, and neither the cops nor the public mind? And the thing these thugs hate most in the world is, not the cops as one would think, but rather…get this, journalists! And why? Because journalists don’t “get” their secret world, and write stories that are less than flattering about them. So they go into a homicidal rage at even the mention of a reporter or a newspaper. Ridiculous!

Oh, and did I mention Lexi Alexander wrote this deep, brilliant script? I’m sure having fought in some female karate matches she feels she knows about male culture, indeed has a special “in” that no other woman has. She seems to think she has some superior intellect, that she’s more clever than she really is, and the movie smarter than it is. This movie drips with conceited, self-congratulatory backslapping, as if the director were proclaiming in every shot, “I know I nailed this genre!”
And how does she manifest the harshness of male-camraderie –basically she has guys getting drunk in every scene and constantly threatening to “beat the sh*t” out of each other, or “kill” each other or –well, you get the idea. To her as long as they aren’t sitting around talking about their feelings that makes it “authentically” male. It would be the same as Rob Zombie trying to do a movie about female camraderie. Girls chatting in a restaurant, and talking about boys. On second thought, Zombie would do a better job than Alexander.

And Lexi Alexandner, whose inch-thick Russian accent is nigh-impossible to stand, is all I need to see to tell me stay away from this flick. The ONLY reason she’s been offered Punisher 2 is because NOBODY else wanted it. So they gave it to a very young, very inexperienced director –bottom of the barrel. She doesn’t know anything about Punisher (the same handicap Hensleigh had) she doesn’t have a vision for the film, and she didn’t even bother to try to have input on the script, she just accepted it as-was. Then again, I can’t imagine what that neaderthal Lexi could contribute to the script. For her this is just a paycheck. Has anyone seen anything from her telling us her “vision” for the franchise? How she’s going to improve it? Has she said anything about what she’ll be doing differently than Hensleighs’ bomb? Of course not. She can’t be bothered.
And her gushing over Ray Stevenson. A braindead director with a deadpan actor. Punisher 2 has quality written all over it, I can feel it.
And as for the name change– so what? That’s like taking a Pinto, calling it a Jaguar, and then saying you’ve improved the vehicle.

Ray Stevenson was quite good in Rome I thought. God knows how this one will turn out.