10 Underappreciated Comic Book Movies That Deserve A Second Chance

You can say this for Marvel: if at first they don’t succeed, they try and try again. While this Punisher movie is closer to the source material than Jonathan Hensleigh’s 2004 movie, it was also considerably less successful, earning back less than a third of its budget at the box office.

Thanks to a meatier script and some flamboyant villains, though, it’s still the best of the three. Eschewing another origin story, War Zone pits Frank Castle (Ray Stevenson) against the disfigured Jigsaw (Dominic West) and his brother Loony Bin Jim, played with wide-eyed abandon by Doug Hutchison.

Letting rip with all the gore-soaked insanity that Hensleigh held back on, War Zone introduces Castle doing what he does best – tearing out throats, snapping necks and taking out hordes of bad guys while hanging upside down from a chandelier. This is not the generic character played previously by Dolph Lundgren and Thomas Jane but a snarling, laconic vigilante and Stevenson acquits himself well in the part.

It’s too bad he never got the chance to reprise the role in a sequel, but the movie’s failure had a silver lining: it paved the way for Jon Bernthal’s awesome turn as Frank in the Netflix Daredevil series.