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75Among the recent spate of comic-book movies, from "Spider-Man" to the "X-Men," The Punisher is unique.
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75Trashy and disturbingly violent yet fairly zippy and amusingly cast.
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70Unlike some of its recent ilk – "Spider-Man," for example – The Punisher is, no disrespect, a thoroughly morose and bilious affair. That is precisely what I like best about it.
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63Considering the horrible buzz that had dogged the movie since its trailers first premiered, The Punisher turns out to be a likable underdog.
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63The Punisher punishes. That's what he does, and that's all this movie does.
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60That rare comic book movie that actually feels like a comic book. Which turns out to be mostly, but not entirely, a good thing.
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50The Punisher is so grim and cheerless, you wonder if even its hero gets any satisfaction from his accomplishments.
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50The most entertaining scenes focus on the lovable louts and losers who share the boardinghouse where the protagonist - based on a comic-book character billed as a superhero without superpowers - prepares his grisly exploits. The rest is mayhem.
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50Travolta is terrific as a bad guy, making Saint almost sympathetic. His co-stars however, flounder in a sea of bad lines, with poor Romijn-Stamos getting stuck with the worst.
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For such a formulaic vigilante film, The Punisher has a far better cast than it deserves.
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50It's a prevailing sense of humor that makes this an entertaining, if silly, film adaptation of the Marvel comic.
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50The second attempt to bring a dark corner of the Marvel comic-book universe to the screen, this comic-book-based revenge story is undermined by its inconsistent tone.
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50There's something to be said for letting a comic book adaptation operate at the level of a comic book--i.e., with cheap laughs and ice-cold sadism.
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42It's hard to imagine how anyone could sit through this thing except squirming critics and violence addicts in need of a particularly gruesome fix.
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40A tone-deaf muddle that shifts moods more often than its lone wolf vigilante rubs out bad guys, clocking in at a punishingly paced two hours and change.
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40The movie lives up to its “R” rating in the final scenes, but it’s too little too late.
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40A creaky script which avoids tackling the morality of Castle's actions, while Hensleigh doesn't do himself any favours by slowing the film's momentum with leaden editing.
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With topical revenge fantasies already available (Dogville, the Kill Bills) and with Roy Scheider on hand as a gun-loving paterfamilias, The Punisher mismanages its greatest asset: an unusual embarrassment of camp riches.
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40Fires blanks. Thoroughly routine, pic plays like a paint-by-numbers pilot for bygone basic-cable teleseries.
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40Punishes the audience with a flat starring performance; Mr. Jane finds few sparks of life in a hero who wasn't all that lively to begin with.
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38It features an insane amount of violence and a number of visual references to the comic, but it lacks the original's humor and spirit.
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38The Punisher isn't Frank Castle; it's Jonathan Hensleigh. And the punishee is anyone sitting in the audience.
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38From an audience perspective, the title’s fairly apt as well.
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An overemphatic revenge fantasy devoid of even a trace of excitement or wit.
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30If you can get past the goofy writing, there's lots of noisy action in The Punisher, but little of it is particularly exhilarating. In fact, it's more of an endurance test. If you can sit through it, you should consider yourself duly punished.
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30Sadly, The Punisher is about little more than bullets hitting bone, and how good it might feel to be on the right end of a gun.
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30Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes "Kill Bill" look like "In the Bedroom."
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25In a case study of how to screw up a simple, powerful revenge story, director Jonathan Hensleigh punishes audiences with an unbearably sluggish action movie that requires the word "action" to be placed in quotes.
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25The movie is as grim and grave as the comic book. But it lacks atmosphere. It's often illogical and drubs you numb with its single dimension: noisy retribution.
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20As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.
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20The Punisher would be almost offensive were it not so inconsequential. There's just something terribly off-putting about a movie in which every gruesome death is a punch line, where a villain's homosexuality is used to lure him to his death and dozens of innocents are gunned down just to launch a film franchise.
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20A sickeningly manipulative, by-the-numbers revenge movie.
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16The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.
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It actually makes the 1989 version (starring Dolph Lundgren) look pretty good by comparison. Oh, yes. It's that ghastly.
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0The Punisher is such a bad film that it becomes inadvertently entertaining; it’s enough to make you pine for the original version of the black-clad Marvel Comics’ badass, played to awful imperfection in 1989 by Dolph Lundgren.
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0Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 40 out of 56
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Mixed: 5 out of 56
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Negative: 11 out of 56
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