With the price of admission you also get a comic book as this character, The Punisher, is from Marvel Comics, but this character is different in that he has no superpowers. He is just an angry person in a tight black T-shirt printed with a white skull given to him by his son to supposedly ward off evil spirits.
FBI special agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) is on his final assignment after which he plans to retire and live happily ever after with his wife, Maria (Samantha Mathis) and their young son. But as last assignments seem to go wrong so also to this one. A sting operation to nab a contraband firearms dealer results in the unintended death of Bobby Saint, the son of Tampa Bay crime syndicate boss Howard Saint (John Travolta). The grieving Saint and his lovely wife, Livia (Laura Herring) want the man responsible for their son's death to pay and use their underground ties to find out that Castle posing as a dope distributor did not die in the shoot-off.
It just so happens that Castle is at his family's reunion on an island off Florida and Saint sends a group of his henchmen to kill his whole family at the request of his wife, Livia. Everyone is killed but miraculously Castle survives and becomes The Punisher, with only one goal, to destroy Howard Saint and everything he stands for. Holed up in a dilapidated tenement, Frank meticulously plots a perfect revenge scheme and finds unlikely friends and allies in his neighbors, Mr. Bumpo (John Pinette), Spacker Dave (Ben Foster) and Joan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). This is a good action movie and I would recomend it to the 'R' movie goers.
The action begins and doesn't finish until the last scene. This is such a better movie with Thomas Jane as the hero than the 1989 straight-to-video version starring Dolph Lundgren. Lundgren looked nothing like the comic book version of the Punisher, and that movie deviated from the original storyline. Enjoy!!
-Barbara Higdon
