The Punisher -- 2004 -- R

Marvel has gone hog wild in getting all their comic books made into movies, but this one runs a bit darker than most of their underoos laden heroes. No, this time, we have a guy with a darker back story who is a bit more creative in his actions than just tracking down the bad guy to throw him to a dismal death off a roof top.

Enter Frank Castle. He’s an FBI agent retiring to London to play out the rest of his career in peace and quiet. Well, almost. You see, his last assignment had a minor snag to it in that the sone of a prominent "businessman" was killed during the operation. Naturally, this individual’s death was not the fault of our man Castle, but to Howard Saint, who is no saint, of course, that doesn’t matter. He wants revenge for his son’s death.

Oh, but wait. Little wifey wants more than revenge on Castle. As luck would have it, he’s in Puerto Rico at a family reunion, so she wants him and his family wiped out. Since we have another hour and a half to go after all this, that operation, unfortunately, goes off without a hitch, and over thirty men, women, and children are mercilessly slaughtered at this family reunion, leaving us with no sympathy for Mr. Saint and nothing but a desire to back Castle as he tries to rediscover himself through his vendetta.

It doesn’t take Castle long to discover whodunit, and since no one is in jail over this, he is understandably upset. So begins the operation to not just kill Saint and his people, but to ruin him first. The development of the characters through their actions is pretty good. Some of the supporting cast is fairly thin, but we "get" them well enough for the purposes of the film. Their actions are made fairly straightforward (though occasionally sterotypical) which makes them also easy to understand.

The murder attempts on Castle are occasionally tiresome and after the first couple, they wore on me and I’m left hoping that future attempts are truncated to move the plot a bit quicker. It’s an action film, so no such luck.

The central plot, however, of the start of Castle’s pain through his going afte Saint, was very well done, and was only made weaker by the sidebar plots, particularly the waste of time that was the other tenants in the apartment building. The back story portion, encompassing the first half hour, was about as worst-case-scenario as you can get, which made it more diabolical and more interesting and engaging than if they’d tried to soften it a bit. It’s very brutal (K-I-M gave the violence a 10), so not for the weak of heart, but also quite necessary to feel the impact of what happened.

So it’s a fairly good film with some strong enough leads and strong central plot. The trouble is once you start moving away from that center, it’s easy to lose interest in everything else and you end up waiting for the central plot to start going again so you can keep up with the only interesting part of the film.