Now, as I mentioned, the film does make a few missteps along the way that keep it from coming close to perfection. Travolta’s performance often feels off, as though he’s split between two different films, keeping Saint from having the kind of screen presence that could have made him a truly engaging villain. The occasional use of 2000s metal/rock – in all its Seether and Drowning Pool-filled glory – also dates the film a bit, and Castle’s entire family being wiped out is needlessly over-the-top, especially considering that the death of his wife and child is the only loss that leaves an impact anyway. Finally, there’s also a bit of a tonal problem throughout the film that nearly undermines the dark journey Castle is on.
Take, for instance, Castle’s battle with the Russian. On its own, the scene is highly enjoyable, effective had the rest of the movie been in line with the borderline slapstick tone the fight itself draws strength from. However, this is a movie where a woman and her child were run down by a truck while fleeing for their lives not even an hour earlier, and now Frank Castle is on the verge of mugging at the camera as he’s thrown around while “La Donna E’ Mobile” plays for comedic effect.
Furthermore, just a few minutes after that’s over, the film unleashes a brutal scene in which Howard’s right-hand man, Quentin Glass, tortures one of Castle’s neighbors by plucking each and every facial piercing he has out, which strikes a tone completely different than the Russian sequence and can even be contrasted against an earlier one in which Castle tortures Mickey Duka with nothing more than a popsicle and the smell of burning meat that’s played for laughs.
The tonal inconsistency is hard to ignore as such, but thankfully that’s as goofy as it ever gets, as when the film does go dark, it’s at its best. The scene in which Castle finds he’s gotten there too late to save his wife and son is fantastic, devolving into a feeble one-way shootout with Saint’s men that garners more sympathy for the character than seeing any of his nameless relatives being gunned down.
Another moment, when Harry Heck introduces himself to Castle in a quiet diner, singing to him before promising to kill him, is wonderfully tense where it could’ve easily come off as cheesy. Even once everything is over and justice has been served, Castle immediately goes home to kill himself in a pretty powerful scene that pays off the film’s flirtations with Castle’s descent into alcoholism, giving us a moment that even some of today’s more beloved comic book movies would never dare dream to show.
Without even pulling the trigger, it’s in this moment of utter solitude – not on the battlefield – that Frank Castle truly dies and the Punisher is born, and it’s the type of scene that demonstrates that the film tried to offer audiences something more than just a series of scenes of the character being a badass strung together by the thinnest of plots.