The Punisher (1989)

 

Genre: Action/Superhero        Time: 1 hour 30mins        Director: Mark Goldblatt

Quick summary: When Frank Castle's family is murdered by criminals, he wages war on crime as a vigilante assassin known only as The Punisher.

To kick this off, I'm going to set the bar on how bad this movie is. The punisher doesn't even have his iconic skull symbol. 

Dolph Lundgren plays Frank Castle, a cop whose family has been mistakenly murdered by the mafia. Believed to have been killed in the same accident, Frank disappears underground and goes vigilante as The Punisher hell bent on revenge.

The plot doesn't really have much to do with The Punisher comics at all far as I can tell. Sure there's Frank Castle's backstory (a very loose backstory though). The kids in the film mostly ruined it for me. It made the film seem like it was undecided whether it wanted to be family-friendly or not.

The main problem is that this film is just so boring. Everything about it follows the formula of an 80s action film: from the enemies to the stereotypical black 80s cop to the involvement of children to the soundtrack to the camerawork to everything else. If you've seen any other action film from the 80s you've essentially seen this one. This feels very much the stepping stone for marvel superhero films.

Lundgren does a decent job portraying The Punisher/Frank Castle, for the most part. He certainly fits the look, though it doesn't really feel like he wanted to do the role. It feels very much half-assed. 

This is an action film, and the action scenes are lame. They're boring. The action is dull, unimaginative, and very cheesy, and not in a good way. They seem as if they ran out of time for editing or they just didn't know what they were doing? It's all very unpolished.

I really didn't like this film, and I honestly recommend you skip it. Unless you wanna watch an awful film with a bunch of friends and make fun of how truly bad this film was.

1/10

• "Come on god, answer me. for years I'm asking why, why are the innocent dead and the guilty alive? Where is justice? Where is punishment? Or have you already answered, have you already said to the world here is justice, here is punishment, here, in me."

• "I still talk to God sometimes, I ask him if what I'm doing is right or wrong, I'm still waiting for an answer, and until I get one, I'll be waiting, watching, THE GUILTY WILL BE PUNISHED!"