Another Marvel Comics hero film, and not at all a bad one, despite the tendency of our local newspaper (using a syndicated review) to give it a D+ or some such rating.

“The Punisher”, a minor Marvel hero who first appeared (I think; it’s very late) in “Spider-Man” sometime back in the sixties, is Frank Castle, an FBI agent whose last field job, before taking over the London office of the FBI ⁽¹⁾, is point man in a weapons-deal bust that goes wrong, leaving the dock littered with corpses, among whom is Bobbie Saint, son of Tampa mobster Howard Saint (John Travolta). Saint and his wife Livia ⁽²⁾ (Laura Harring) vow revenge and have Castle’s entire family gunned down, blown up and run over during a happy family reunion in Puerto Rico. Castle himself is shot, burned and blown into the ocean (in a scene that immediately reminded me of Liam Neeson in Darkman, another comic adaptation), but apparently has more survival capability than Rasputin (see e.g. Hellboy). Nursed back to health by a local juju man named Candelaria, he returns to Florida and sets out to take his revenge on Saint — though he refuses to admit that this is revenge, instead describing it as “punishment”. Much of the “punishment”, however, is not visited by Castle upon Saint; Castle tricks Saint into punishing himself in various unpleasant ways.

There is a romantic semi-subplot with waitress Joan (Mystique, I mean Rebecca Romijn-recently Stamos), who shares a floor in Castle’s rundown tenement residence with him and two other unlikely characters, the opera-singing gourmet cook Bumpo (comedian John Pinette) and the multiply pierced and beringed Spacker Dave (Ben Foster), who has more to him, it turns out, than his reticent, doubtful behavior suggests at first. There’s also an epic battle between Castle and a massive hit man known only as “The Russian” (Kevin Nash), during which the walls and doors of that tenement residence mostly disappear …

I’m not sure that I’d want to go see this again, or that I’ll choose the DVD for my filmotheque. But, if you don’t mind a little violence and a little blood (or a lot of violence and a lot of blood — not to mention various explosions and a burning car park) this is a fun way of killing a couple of hours.

⁽²⁾ A well-chosen name, as anyone who has read “I, Claudius” will recognize.