Actor Thomas Jane has now been featured in two of the worst comic book to movie adaptations. The first was "The Crow: City of Angels," a 1996 stinker in which he played a crooked henchman; the second is "The Punisher," an ugly revenge movie with bad acting, worse writing and amateurish production values.
In "The Punisher," Jane plays Frank Castle, a career FBI man. Hours before his retirement, an undercover bust goes wrong and the youngest son of mobster Howard Saint (John Travolta) is killed. The Saints want revenge, and find it in Puerto Rico, where, amazingly and conveniently, Castle is enjoying a post-retirement family reunion. Every family member is gunned down by hit men, including women and children, and Castle is shot and left for dead. He survives, however, and sets himself to punish the people responsible.
Most of "The Punisher" is drenched in violence, but it falls in a strange no man's land between stylized comic-book carnage and visceral brutality. The massacre in Puerto Rico, for example, is surprisingly bloodless. Stranger still are random scenes of dark humor and one intensely unsettling scene of torture. The movie doesn't seem to know how to address the violence of Frank Castle's world. Is it funny, disturbing or simply background music? Most of the time, it's uninteresting.
No one can be blamed more for that than Jonathan Hensleigh, who directed and co-wrote "The Punisher." Hensleigh is a prolific action writer, having penned "The Saint," "Armageddon," and "Die Hard: With a Vengeance." His script for "The Punisher" is an absolute mess, filled with undeveloped secondary characters, inexplicable subplots, and contrivance after contrivance. The dialogue is particularly awful, filled with a dozen laughable one-liners.
Had the movie not been edited down from its original running time (176 minutes), the subplots and the characters might make more sense. On the other hand, those extra 52 minutes might have been just as grueling as the 124 which remain.
The most consistent part of "The Punisher" is its lousy acting, which infects everyone from Jane and Travolta to the smaller roles on both sides of the vendetta. The worst offender is Laura Harring, who is positively goofy as Livia Saint, Howard's wife. Then there are Rebecca Romijn, Ben Foster and John Pinette, who play Castle's anti-social neighbors. All three seem totally lost and directionless, and appear to be guessing at their characters' motivation. The only decent performance comes from Will Patton, who plays sadist Quentin Glass, the Saint family's lawyer and advisor.
The story of The Punisher will be retold this winter in "Punisher: War Zone," a sequel of sorts with a new cast, director and group of writers, two of whom contributed to "Iron Man," one of the better comic book to movie adaptations. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the 2004 release and push The Punisher is a more compelling and coherent direction.
* 1/2 out of ****
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