Very disappointing.
Decent but highly violent action sequences could not keep Punisher: War Zone from being boring at best, and painful at worst. Don't blame Ray Stevenson, who plays the title character - he absolutely shines playing a violent antihero in HBO's "Rome" - that's why I chanced seeing the movie despite less than inviting trailers and bad reviews.
I do blame the character he played, though. Frank Castle sees his family get killed by criminals, and the system fails to punish them, so he uses his military skilsl to become the Punisher and see that those criminals, and others like them, still get what he thinks they deserve (violent, painful death). With motivation like that, you'd expect him to be tormented but satisfied by his work - unfortunately he seems to be suffering from boredom and indigestion intead.
I also blame the dialog for being stilted, cliched, or both, and the director, who must have made the mistake of trying to get Stevenson to play Frank Castle differently than he played Titus Pullo in Rome. You can't really blame the plot - sure, it wasn't anything special, but it's based on a Marvel comic book, so the plot is not going to be the strong point.
This kind of movie is made by the moments around the actual killing - a good one-liner, seeing a bad guy get a really appropriate death - and there were few if any such moments. (The only really good one: a bad guy looks down into a bucket Frank kicked across the hall in a firefight, and sees a grenade. Instead of reacting with fear or anger, the bad guy seems exasperated - and partly with himself - and then blows up.)
It's too bad, really. Better dialog could have promoted this movie from a boring waste of time to fun to watch, which is all I really want from a movie. Instead it's one of the few movies I would have preferred to have never seen at all.
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