rank Castle (Jane) is one tough S.O.B. After decades of service with organizations like the Delta Force and the FBI, he has but one mission left to complete before hanging up his guns: to ensnare a local underling named Micky Ducka (Eddie Jemison), who has designs on becoming the biggest gunrunner in Tampa, Fla. Though Frank skillfully completes his mission, Ducka's partner Bobby (James Carpinello) is accidentally killed by incoming agents, and Castle's undercover alter-ego is targeted for murder by Bobby's vengeful father, local businessman Howard Saint (Travolta).
Uncovering Castle's identity, Saint sends a hit squad to murder not only the now-retired FBI man, but his entire clan—who, as coincidence would have it, recently came together for a family reunion. Castle himself is near-fatally injured and thrown into the ocean, but his body drifts back to shore, where a local fisherman mends his wounds. Grief-stricken and obsessed with avenging his family's deaths, Frank moves into a low-income tenement and plots revenge against Saint and his criminal empire. Aided by his fellow tenants, who include Joan (Rebecca Romijn), a waitress recovering from a string of failed relationships; Bumpo (John Pinette), a reclusive, genteel gourmand; and Dave (Ben Foster), a thoroughly pierced twentysomething, Frank infiltrates Saint's empire and begins to destroy the fragile bonds that hold his organization together.
As Saint's business interests—which include drug trafficking and arms deals with criminals and other unsavory types—begin to deteriorate, he enlists a group of international assassins to execute Castle and help regain control of Florida's criminal underworld. Before long, the two men find themselves waging their personal war against the backdrop of the entire city of Tampa, and threaten to destroy themselves in the process of trying to get rid of one another.
An anti-hero, not a superhero
First and foremost on the minds of comic-book fans is no doubt the thought of not one but two big-screen adaptations as mediocre as the 1989 straight-to-video version of The Punisher (which starred the then-quasi-hot Dolph Lundgren). Thankfully, that isn't the case. Reinstated is the character's trademark skull, here adopted as a holdover gift from Castle's fallen son (sprinkled with the expository pixie dust that it also somehow wards off evil spirits), and his penchant for remarkably engaging self-destructiveness.
Thomas Jane (Dreamcatcher) plays Castle just straight enough to work, and anchors the film's palpable drama so that his onscreen co-stars can properly camp up the material to create a uniquely captivating, just-left-of-real version of a superhero story. Like Spider-Man, Hulk and other recent entries from the Marvel Comics canon, Castle is a brooding, introspective character made interesting by a spandex costume and a repertoire of colorful gadgets, but Jane gives the character's anguish credibility, and lends a much-needed degree of ambiguity to his quest for vengeance.
Travolta, on the other hand, practically devours the screen whole, and creates such a monstrous villain in Howard Saint that we can't help but begin to like him by the time he arrives at his inevitable showdown with Castle. Long overdue for a comeback, Travolta might have sensed the uphill battle he faced in trying to surpass the characters he played in fare like Swordfish and Battlefield Earth, but he accomplishes the near-impossible, upping the ante on Saint's smirking entendres with just enough acting chops to make them chilling and believable at the same time.
Jonathan Hensleigh's script obeys an unusual—and unusually successful—structure, developing the characters by allowing the action to escalate the level of implausibility from a very real place in the beginning to something that teeters but doesn't quite fall into an abyss of cartoonish abandon. Though this creates pacing problems as the film starts, once the gears of plot grind into motion the scenes of violence and action become increasingly exaggerated, giving the film a larger-than-life feel as it ascends toward its tumultuous climax. No person could possibly take seriously Castle's flaming-skull calling card, but the film makes such a subtle transition from the believable elements to the more extreme ones that we can hardly begrudge the last-minute wink the film makes in the audience's direction. Hensleigh (writer of such bombastic epics as The Rock and Armageddon) creates the perfect balance between the real world and the comic-book one, and makes The Punisher into an effective and memorable addition to the growing universe of comic heroes finding new life on the big screen.
