The real punishment happened to those who bought tickets.
| Overall Grade: | D- |
| Story: | D+ |
| Acting: | D- |
| Direction: | F |
| Visuals: | D |
Summary: Average story, bad casting, poor acting, disgustingly poor visuals and a director that fell asleep; content warnings- prolonged scenes of intense violence and B-movie gore.
For this movie, its hard to pick where to start with the review. Out of the gate, I think the casting was the core problem. Maybe the most effective and believable death blow in the film was dealt by Jennifer Smith and Tricia Wood whose work on casting strung together a group of misfit action and side-line characters that can't play their roles. It starts with Ray Stevenson who is abysmally cast as Frank Castle, the Punisher. I rarely compare movies in a series when leads change, but Thomas Jane did a crisp rendition of the Marvel Comic vigilante in the 2004 release of the Punisher. He was emotive when engaged in human contact and dark and brooding when overtaken by greif and vengence as the story calls for. Stevenson looks thoughtless and dismissive of the role he is given. When he has a scene to strike the tension of human and vengeful warrior, he plummets into cutesy comments and unconvincing stoic acknowledgement of emotions. It was lame.
Dominic West who plays the villian, Jigsaw, is given a corny set of lines that don't come close to anything other than a comedic failure of the essense intended for his character. The normally intensely brilliant Doug Hutchison tries to save the film with his always intense acting, but is given unbelievably over the top dialog and scenes which comprise of him biting a man to death and joking about "axing" someone a question which he chases him down with a tree chopper. If it was just a action filled movie with reasonable violence that made sense, I'd have chalked it up to a standard Hollywood grab at the "guy movie" for the holidays. But this was so poorly executed, they saw the writing on the wall. To rescue it, they threw in way over-the-top gore scenes of just plane stupid violence. Nothing about the movie made sense. Stevenson didn't even look fit for the the agile, near super-quick and smart actions scenes of the Punisher. He was slow, unconvincing and kept looking like he was ready for a latte break.
Honestly, I'd rather have watched the 2004 version of the Punisher again (for the 10th time) than watch this movie. I wouldn't even recommend you renting it for any reason. There is nothing there to watch, unless maybe you like campy 50's, B-movie gore attempting to be a big time action film. One has to wonder whether rumors of a dispute with the director, Lexi Alexander, and the movie company Lionsgate didn't have some effect here. This film looks like Alexander worked for the first 45 minutes, when let chaos reign on the set, not just the story line.
Thoroughly disappointing and disgusting.
Amazon Link: http://amzn.to/SxJzok
Review by Kim Gentes.