10 Action Movies That Looked Awesome But Sucked

10. The Punisher

Jonathan Hensleigh wrote Die Hard With A Vengeance so he seemed a good choice to write and direct a movie based on the Marvel Comics character. Unfortunately, his directorial debut only serves to remind us that he also wrote The Saint, Armageddon and Next.

No movie with Thomas Jane in the lead, John Travolta as the villain and Will Patton as his henchman should be this bland, but Hensleigh takes two hours to tell an origin story so banal it could’ve been addressed in a line of dialogue. At 140 minutes, the “alternate version” runs longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Even for a comic book movie, though, it’s pretty lunkheaded. Jane moves into an apartment complex where everybody knows who he is, yet Travolta still has trouble finding him so instead he hires The Russian, a 7 foot tall muscleman presumably on loan from a local circus. Though he’s capable of tearing a toilet out of the wall and using it to beat his opponent, he’s surprisingly easy to defeat – his skin is so sensitive that throwing boiling water in his face is enough to transform him into Freddy Krueger.