9. Mass Murder Is The Best Revenge - The Punisher & The Punisher: War Zone
After Frank Castle (Thomas Jane or, ugh, that bloke who looks like he belongs on Eastenders) endures the vicious murder of his family and is left for dead, he decides to get revenge, fashioning a persona for himself, where he takes a strictly right-wing brand of vengeance against those who have wronged him, mercilessly murdering them and everyone who as much as breathes in their general direction. Castle is clearly a traumatised vigilante, and rightly, the film is rated R to keep it out of the hands of children, yet the notion of making us root for a man who is clearly in need of some therapy before he ends up "punishing"
himself is a little creaky, no? It's not like Castle takes a moral absolutionist "eye for an eye" approach to murder, either; he's pretty indiscriminate about which bad guys he kills, usually in the most ridiculously gory fashion possible (especially in the second film). At the end of War Zone, a cop even tries to persuade him to give up his hobby because he has apparently "killed every criminal in town", from the mob boss drug lord to the kid who just downloaded a pirate copy of Dodgeball...