Over to the darker side of the Marvel library, and a character the silver screen just can't seem to get right. Thomas Jane's portrayal in 2004 was way too light on action, and 2011's Ray Stephenson upped that aspect but forgot to nail anything like say, good acting or a believable narrative. Instead Punisher's time to shine would be the 2004 'tie-in' of sorts to that original Thomas Jane movie, with Jane himself reprising the role. He did a fantastic job too, delivering many deadpan one-liners that easily connoted Garth Ennis' MAX comic series, alongside a plethora of characters and bucketloads of gore to boot. The big innovation (and the reason the game was forced to have a black and white filter applied to some scenes) was the ability to grab any enemy and torture them for information in a variety of ways, ranging from feeding them to piranhas to trapping their heads in clock tower-style cogs, gigantic limb-severing lasers and much, much more. The whole thing was just big, dumb fun with a game engine that really made you feel like you were Frank Castle, delivering his righteous revenge one shotgun blast at a time, and although Marvel are still hesitant to adapt him once more despite his role in the Civil War arc, the perfect version of the character is already right here.
