"The Punisher" is a Criminal Offense

Shame, really, for the pieces are in place for something much better. Tom Jane (“Deep Blue Sea”) is deeply sexy as the title character, former FBI agent turned black-clad vigilante Frank Castle, and John Travolta (“Pulp Fiction”) seems to be having a wonderful time camping it up as chief villain megalomaniac Howard Saint. For added muscle, the supporting cast includes pro character actors like Roy Schieder (“Jaws”), Samantha Mathis (“In America”) and Will Patton (“Armageddon”), while “X-Men” babe Rebecca Romijn-Stamos pumps up the hottie quotient as a down-on-her-luck waitress whom tries to help Castle get over the death of his wife and child.

But all the talent in the world couldn’t breathe life into first-time director Jonathan Hensleigh (“Die Hard with a Vengeance”) and Michael France’s (“Goldeneye”) generically derivative and downbeat screenplay. Cribbing freely from malevolence-fueled tales as diverse as “The Crow,” “Death Wish” and “Revenge,” the duo have taken the popular Marvel Comics’ character and turned him into a death-mongering robot. While it is easy to feel for a man who’s lost everything; Castle’s entire family is wiped out by Saint after a arms bust leads to the death of the latter’s son; it’s not as easy to feel for a brooding sadist. But that is exactly what Frank is, and while there is some perverse satisfaction in seeing Saint and his cronies get their just deserts, it gets tedious after the fourth or fifth execution.

It doesn’t help that, as depicted in Hensleigh and France’s screenplay, Castle must be the most idiotic vigilante killer in movie history. He announces his attentions to not only Saint, but to the world, right from the get-go, the fact that no police ever appear at his doorstep to arrest him after the first couple of killings an enigma unto itself. Not like they couldn’t have found his secret hideout, for from all appearances, Frank must have published it in at least a dozen phonebooks. Supposedly unstoppable killers show up one after the other to do him in, only to find themselves bludgeoned, stabbed, pummeled, shot or thrown down stairs to their bloody death.

In all honesty, the cast does try. Jane is a very good actor and does the most he can with the one-dimensional central character. And, in the spirit of honesty, I could watch him prance around the screen with his shirt off all day, and with “The Punisher” being almost two-hours in interminable length it almost felt like I had. Travolta is even better, bringing far more shading to the villainous Saint than the movie deserves. Whether throwing a woman off a bridge in front of a speeding train or gently stroking his wife’s porcelain face, there is a complex character bursting to break forth in the actor’s portrayal. As for the rest, they’re fine, for the most part, but as they’re all nothing more than afterthoughts in the screenplay, Hensleigh the director treats them as such in his limited direction.

All of this culminates in one of the most unexciting final assaults I’ve ever had the misfortune of sitting through. Showcasing a hodgepodge of cool weaponry and busload of glass-shattering pyrotechnics, Castle’s undoing of the Saint empire is as rote and forgettable as a bad blind date. It’s an exhausting sequence, all of it climaxing with a piece of sadistic cruelty unseen since Nicolas Cage tried to uncover a snuff film in the gawd-awful “8mm.”

Through it all, I found myself almost admiring the Dolph Lundgren take on this character back during the 1990’s. Sure, his version of “The Punisher” was bad, but you at least felt the movie knew it was bad, so there was still some perverse so-bad-it-almost-good satisfaction to be found amidst the chaos. But here, you can’t help but get the feeling Hensleigh and company feel as if they are making some profound statement on crime and punishment, a manifesto celebrating force as the great savior of justice.