The Punisher opens today

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Before becoming a blood-thirsty vigilante bent on murdering gangsters of all stripes, the Punisher studied to be a priest. You have to give the guy credit for a unique career trajectory: from seminarian to slasher.
He was Frank Castle back then, and the movie doesn't explain why he left the priesthood, but maybe it had something to do with that pesky "Thou shalt not kill" commandment.

In between the seminary and killing rampages, he was a Marine and had a wife and child. Deep within his tortured psyche, the self-styled avenging angel might still feel the stirrings of faith. Before going off to slay bad guys and rescue a mother and child in peril, he visits a church and chats up a priest, offering his version of a confession: "Somebody has to punish the corrupt."

Ray Stevenson plays the punitive fellow. In Punisher: War Zone, he's an ordinary guy, not a superhero, though he is a sure shot and ruggedly handsome. Besides flesh-and-blood nemeses, he wrestles psychic demons. In his bloodlust to slay Mafia types, he accidentally kills a law enforcement officer. He must protect the man's widow and young daughter and fend off Jigsaw (Dominic West) and Loony Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison) and the army they've assembled to punish him.

Faces are blown off. Bodily fluids mix with gallons of gushing, spewing blood. The dialogue is beyond clichéd, and performances feel cobbled together from other movies.

Characters speak in banalities: "Let's do this" is repeated. Then there's the evocative growling: "Stay out of my way" and "You boys play nice." The best is a reference to a malevolent immigrant as "an Old Country genocidal maniac." What may matter most to those who consider this as entertainment is the grisly violence. A chair leg impales an eye, kidneys are yanked from a living body, a bad guy is thrown into a glass-recycling machine.

At one point, the Punisher is asked who punishes him. The better question for those who made this inane bloodfest is: Why punish us?