Time for my favorite Frank scene! This was a hard choice, but I had to go with Front Toward Enemy, because the acting is just phenomenal. The scene with Frank listening to Karen on the radio just takes such an emotional turn, and I may have watched it a dozen or so times.
Look at him. Relaxed, leaning back in his chair. Listening to Karen spar with Senator Ori, not correcting David when he refers to Karen as “Your girlfriend.”
He even has that half smile when David says, “Thirty-seven?” and he replies, “That they know about,” with a certain amount of dry amusement.
It all changes when Lewis gets on the phone.
He sits up, a muscle visibly clenching in his jaw when Karen snarls at the bomber. He knows men like Lewis - he knows what they’re capable of. And the thought of one of them targeting Karen cracks open every single scar he thought had healed over. It harkens back to their first conversation, when he told Karen that it was his job to protect his family and he failed. Now, Karen is one of the few people to fight for him, who risked her life to unbury the truth about what happened to his family. She believed him when no one else did. And he pulled away from her in order to keep her safe - and yet here she is, being singled out by a bomber.
He has to stand with his back to David, presumably to hide the fact that his hands are visibly shaking. And look at his hands: no longer are his fingers casually interlaced, but he holds his trigger finger. Almost as if he’s afraid of what he might do, should he have a weapon in hand. And he looks as if he’s staring into a future so bleak he can’t even fully comprehend it.
David, for all of his gentle teasing about Karen, has never fully understood what she means to Frank. So he’s skeptical, wary of the need to track down this seemingly random individual. It’s only when Frank snaps, when his voice breaks on the words, “If something happens to her, I…”
And then Frank echoes that one word he said to Karen, back when they were standing beside the river. When he pleaded with her to understand why he couldn’t go about taking down Cerberus her way.
“Please,” he says. Frank Castle has faced torture and certain death with a sneer, but the thought of Karen at risk… that is the one time he’ll beg. Not for his life, but for hers.
(Also David’s wedding ring is PROMINENT throughout the framing of that scene and you cannot tell me that was a coincidence.)
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