Punisher, The

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Among the recent spate of comic-book movies, from "Spider-Man" to the "X-Men," The Punisher is unique.

USA Today Mike Clark

Trashy and disturbingly violent yet fairly zippy and amusingly cast.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Unlike 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.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Considering the horrible buzz that had dogged the movie since its trailers first premiered, The Punisher turns out to be a likable underdog.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

The Punisher punishes. That's what he does, and that's all this movie does.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

That rare comic book movie that actually feels like a comic book. Which turns out to be mostly, but not entirely, a good thing.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The 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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The 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.

Philadelphia Inquirer David Hiltbrand

For such a formulaic vigilante film, The Punisher has a far better cast than it deserves.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

It's a prevailing sense of humor that makes this an entertaining, if silly, film adaptation of the Marvel comic.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Travolta 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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The Punisher is so grim and cheerless, you wonder if even its hero gets any satisfaction from his accomplishments.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

There'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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's hard to imagine how anyone could sit through this thing except squirming critics and violence addicts in need of a particularly gruesome fix.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

A 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.

Variety Joe Leydon

Fires blanks. Thoroughly routine, pic plays like a paint-by-numbers pilot for bygone basic-cable teleseries.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

The movie lives up to its “R” rating in the final scenes, but it’s too little too late.

Village Voice Benjamin Strong

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.

Empire Chris Hewitt

A 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.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Punishes 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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

An overemphatic revenge fantasy devoid of even a trace of excitement or wit.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

It features an insane amount of violence and a number of visual references to the comic, but it lacks the original's humor and spirit.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

From an audience perspective, the title’s fairly apt as well.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The Punisher isn't Frank Castle; it's Jonathan Hensleigh. And the punishee is anyone sitting in the audience.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Sadly, 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.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Its 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."

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

If 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.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The 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.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

In 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.

Slate David Edelstein

A sickeningly manipulative, by-the-numbers revenge movie.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

As 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.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The 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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

It actually makes the 1989 version (starring Dolph Lundgren) look pretty good by comparison. Oh, yes. It's that ghastly.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

The 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.