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You can almost see the film that Jonathan Hensleigh was trying to make if you squint and turn your face at just the right angle during any scene of The Punisher. It’s one built upon the rough, gritty cinema of Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, and Sam Peckinpah, but without their eye for composition or making the most of a thin budget. Hensleigh just populates his film with rote characterizations, laughable sequences, and a particularly awful performance from John Travolta during a decade where his performances were near uniformly atrocious.
The basics of the Punisher’s modus operandi are known, mainly thanks to an appearance in the Netflix suite of shows before getting his own spinoff, but for the uninitiated I shall recap: Frank Castle (Thomas Jane, glowering and mistaking dark hair dye for a personality) is an FBI agent that’s run afoul of a mafia boss (Travolta) leading to the massacre of his entire life and rebirth a soulless killing machine out for revenge known only as the Punisher. Here’s a Marvel character that I’ve never been able to care about, so his first major outing as a movie star (Dolph Lundgren’s 1989 B-movie notwithstanding) is met with more of a shrug than anything else from me.
Maybe better performances or livelier action sequences would’ve roused my interest, but Jane just looks dyspeptic throughout and Travolta never conjures any menace. Ben Foster, Rebecca Romijn, Laura Harring, Samantha Mathis, and Roy Scheider all get roped into this mess and are left stranded without much to do. Mathis and Scheider are egregiously underutilized as the doomed wife and father of Castle, while Foster and Romijn exist merely as characters for Castle to brood against. Harring’s trophy wife role is nearly incomprehensible given the depth of performance she managed in Mulholland Drive just a few years prior. You assemble a cast this talented and give them nothing to work or do that makes use of their skills immediately qualifies The Punisher as a stinker.
But there’s more cinematic sins that stack up beside a squandered cast, like a poor script, obviously cheap budget, and action scenes that are big on violence as spectacle AND so dour and laughably silly that you wonder just who you’re supposed to be rooting for and why. Perhaps that’s the biggest problem with The Punisher – there’s no reason to care or person to root for as Castle goes about enacting his revenge. By trying to play everything so grim Hensleigh inadvertently stepped into hokey and hammy territory when he clearly wanted to make the equivalent of Dirty Harry or The French Connection but wound up making his Reindeer Games.
