Mark Goldblatt
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With off-the-shelf shootout and showdown scenes that differ from any other over-the-top action fare only in their gloomy lighting, "The Punisher" can't begin to measure up to the popcorn vengeance of Mel Gibson's Payback or the moody, provocative, primal reprisal of Steven Soderbergh's The Limey In fact, even the cheap, cheesy 1989 B-movie adaptation of the same Marvel comic book (with dramatically lumbering Dolph Lungren in the title role) was more entertainingly bad than this picture.
A blond Russian hitman (wrestler Kevin Nash) has a comical throwdown with the Punisher set to Verdi’s “La Donna E Mobile,” and though the scene provides a momentary respite from Carlo Siliotto’s drearily melancholic score, it’s unclear whether this Russkie’s physical similarity to Rocky IV‘s Drago (who was played by Dolph Lundgren, star of the original 1989 B-movie version of The Punisher) is intentional or not.
In 1989, Dolph Lundgren starred in a B-movie take on “The Punisher,” but given the resources applied to this year’s model, couldn’t we have expected something other than a B-movie gussied up with some big names and bigger explosions?
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.
Based on the Marvel comic that was borne out of the mid-70s heyday of Bronson and violent revenge movies in general, this second big-screen version of The Punisher is not only an infinite improvement over the awful 1989 film adaptation starring Dolph Lundgren, but also one of the best films ever to be based on a comic book.
Back in 1989 when “Batman” hit it big, we were cursed with such crap as “Captain America,” “The Punisher” and “The Flash” television show.
Writer-director Boaz Yakin (who directed the gentle football drama "Remember the Titans" but now is back in the mode of his first-produced screenplay with Dolph Lundgren's vigilante tale "The Punisher") proves the ideal enabler for Statham's brand of mindless carnage.
Yakin wrote such movies as "The Punisher" (1989) and "The Rookie" (1990) before his impressive directorial debut with "Fresh," and for the first 25 minutes or so, he appears to have pulled off an unexpected coup with his latest single-syllable effort.
Yakin started out in the ’80s writing action scripts for movies such as “The Punisher” and “The Rookie,” and jumped to directing with the pretty good “Fresh.”
He first made his bones in the film industry by writing scripts for The Punisher and The Rookie (Yakin would go on to direct lauded non-action films Fresh and Remember the Titans) and it is evident that dialogue is not a strong suit, with Safe filled with the usual tacky diatribes and bad puns which seem to sprout in action movie more than any other.
There are some funny lines here and there, and the breezy set-up is effective (especially in establishing Mei’s backstory and math skills), but once the film digs into the plot, takes some clumsy stabs at developing the bond between Luke and Mei and fails to distinguish its various villains (including veteran James Hong as the head of the Chinese mob and Joseph Sikora as the most menacing Russian), it’s clear that Yakin’s script is right in line with his early career efforts writing generic action films “The Punisher” and “The Rookie.”