Actually no, I take that back. It's an execrable movie, a work of such stunning incompetence that, after the relative highs of The Dark Knight and Iron Man, brings us back to the sobering reality that it takes more than just a previous appearance in a comic book to make an entertaining movie, it takes A-List talent. Sadly P:WZ has little of that. It's a goofy, inconsistent mess, too ridiculous to be taken as a serious action film but not nearly smart enough to qualify as satire, and filled with cringeworthy dialogue and juvenile visual motifs such as having every single character wear black or grey (way to undermine the iconography of your main character there, Lexi) and having garish neon tubing light churches, subways, and gun cabinets in a manner reminiscent of Joel Schumacher's Batman movies. The utterly banal story sees Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, accidentally gun down an undercover FBI agent while executing a factory full of mobsters, causing him to have a crisis of conscience and give up Punishing long enough to take responsibility for the dead agent's wife and child. Added to this are two mobsters with a vendetta against Frank, one a disfigured mob enforcer who names himself Jigsaw (played in embarrassing high camp mode by Dominic West, under five pounds of unconvincing rubbery prosthetics), and his brother Loony Bin Jim, a bafflingly absurd cliche "insane" character (meaning he regards everyone with a wide-eyed stare, speaks slowly and menacingly, licks his own blood off his hands, and smashes things while cackling). Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim concoct a plan to kidnap the agent's family so that they can lure The Punisher to oh god who gives a shit.
One of the many problems (and this can be directed at the previous film attempts also) lies in trying to humanize The Punisher and make him sympathetic. He may go around punishing criminals but Frank Castle is not a hero - he began life as a villain in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man, as an example of vigilantism taken to its ugly extreme. Batman is also a vigilante, but he remains morally intact because he never kills his prey - but as we see from the volume of police reports in P:WZ, The Punisher has murdered literally thousands of people, far too many to balance the death of his family. He is a psychopath, his humanity long since stripped away. He's the protagonist but shouldn't ever be treated as the good guy, he should be played as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers - a cold and implacable force of violence who stalks mobsters instead of promiscuous teenagers (indeed the only real entertainment I found in P:WZ was seeing Frank kill off thugs in various gruesome ways, much in the same way I find Friday the 13th entertaining - sadly even this is given too little screentime). He shouldn't ever be aided by the police, grudgingly or otherwise. He shouldn't ever hold hands with a little girl while her mother thanks him for his noble deeds.
The one bright spot is Ray Stevenson, who is perfectly cast as Frank Castle. It's a shame he couldn't have been in a better movie.
(I needed a drawing to accompany this post so I picked the scene where Frank appears at the mobster's banquet - shamelessly ripped off from Miller and Mazzuchelli's Batman: Year One but one of the few scenes I actually didn't mind.)
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