Continuity mistake: After Frank Castle climbs out of his flipped Pontiac GTO, Harry Heck walks up and points his shotgun at Frank. Frank points a closed switchblade knife at Harry and pushes the button, sending the knife blade flying into Harry's neck. When it switches back to Frank, there is still a blade on the knife, in the open position. After a cut to Harry, it switches back to Frank and the knife blade is gone.
The Punisher (2004)
Plot summary
Directed by: Jonathan Hensleigh
Starring: John Travolta, Thomas Jane, Samantha Mathis, Rebecca Romijn, Laura Harring
Frank Castle (Jane) is a man who has seen too much death. On his final assignment, Castle plays his undercover role perfectly, but the operation spins out of control and a young man, Bobby Saint (Carpinello), is inadvertently killed. Inflamed by the death of their son, the Saints are willing to risk their newfound legitimacy on a wholesale mission of blood-vengeance. Castle's worst nightmare is about to come true, as Howard Saint (Travolta) and his lieutenants unleash hell at the Castle family reunion. But Castle, to his everlasting torment, survives. Until this moment, he has spent his entire life adhering strictly to the law. However, experience has taught him that the law cannot adequately penalize the people who murdered his family. Drawing upon all he has learned in 20 years, Castle sets in motion a plan to punish his family's murderers.
Frank Castle: Those who do evil to others, the killers, the rapists, psychos, sadists, will come to know me well. Frank Castle is dead. Call me the Punisher.
Trivia: The guitar player, Harry Heck, is loosely based on the comic character created by Ennis, Dillon, and Palmiotti. His full name is Harry "Heck" Thornton, and he's a southern gun fighter. In the comic, Thornton is an assassin hired to kill the Punisher.
Question: Would Castle's life have really been saved by jumping into the bathtub before the grenade went off?
Answer: It's plausible but highly unlikely. Assuming it's an old metal bathtub (which seems to be the case), it's possible it might have deflected enough of the percussive shock and shrapnel to save him, but unlikely that it'd stop everything. It's one of those things where it probably wouldn't work 90% of the time... but there's that 1 out of 10 chance it could possibly work if he got really lucky and no big pieces of shrapnel came his way. (Plus, stranger things have happened in real life).
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Answer: In Season 9, Episode 20 of "Mythbusters," Adam and Jamie tested whether a person could survive a "toilet bomb" (recreating a Lethal Weapon 2 scene) by jumping into a cast iron bathtub and being covered with a bomb blanket. They used 1 kg of C-4 explosives that created a blast with a peak lethal pressure of 180 psi outside the tub. The pressure inside the tub was recorded as a survivable 8 psi, though with probable hearing damage. From what I read, a grenade has a much lesser psi force than what the C-4 explosion produced. Depending on the circumstances, it seems plausible that a person could survive the force and shrapnel while inside the tub.
raywest ★