Jonathan Hensleigh's \The Punisher"" is a colossal embarrassment. Every scene, every explosion and every atrocious line of dialogue in ""The Punisher"" feels mechanical and artificial. It is a grand failure on every elemental level of filmmaking, and it wouldn't be surprising if the 1990 Dolph Lundgren direct-to-video ""Punisher"" is better.??
Hensleigh is as bad a director as he is a screenwriter, and the dialogue he supplies us with (""God's gonna sit this one out!"") is as bad as any he's written (""Armageddon"" and ""The Saint"" come to mind). In fact, the movie feels like a by-the-numbers collection of adolescent fantasies come true-Hensleigh must have made a checklist of scenes to satiate 14-year-old boys before putting pen to paper.??Overly violent deaths, check.??Pointless chase scenes, check. Stupid, pseudo-menacing voiceover, check. Rebecca Romijn (not Stamos anymore), check.
For those interested, the film begins with the son of villain Howard Saint (John Travolta) getting himself killed in the proverbial drug bust gone awry. Saint wants revenge and, upon discovering that FBI agent Frank Castle (Tom Jane) orchestrated the bust, orders the death of Castle's entire family. Castle is the lone survivor of the massacre, and he immediately proceeds to seek some hard-bitten vigilante justice.
Castle's acts of retribution, however, alternate wildly from too mild to exceptionally vicious. He seems less like an anti-hero and more like a sadistic bastard. Unfortunately, he is a dour, unlikable brute and just as despicable as the villains.??The movie's other characterizations are just as lazily written-especially the obnoxious loser neighbors who forge a tentative bond with our ""hero.""
There is one scene in the movie that shows the potential it had to be an over-the-top, unpretentious thrill ride. It is a brutal, hilarious fight between Castle and a huge Russian henchman (wrestler Kevin Nash) scored to a Verdi opera-an entertaining piece of anarchy that resembles a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon.??Unfortunately, the rest is made up of derivative action sequences, terrible, wooden acting (Travolta puts yet another nail into his career coffin) and phenomenally lousy one-liners. This is the kind of movie that illustrates why comic-book films like ""Spider-Man"" and ""X-Men"" are so rare and successful. It is because of movies like ""The Punisher"" that people don't like mainstream film.
