Action backed by Michael Windmayer's hard-driving music, sets lit with every color but white like Asian horror flicks, sound upped so that everything from footsteps to slashings resemble war battles at their peak, special effects that permit bodies to be squished, sliced, garroted, crushed or snapped (accompanied by the souped-up volume) and cinematography that looks like "Sin City" made on a tight budget - all adding up to suggest this ain't a kiddy flick. Oh, no, it's a violent no-holds-barred, down & ugly, over-the-top war raging between the avenging vigilante Punisher and just about all the Mafia types NYC has to offer. (We know it's the Big Apple because of all the shots from air to street level are forever interspersed between the brutalities, perhaps to stretch the string of blood baths to the film's 107 minutes.)

In this third Punisher film (the other two almost worth sitting through as cardboard versions of the incredible Hulk and other flicks loosely based on a Marvel comic book), we follow this guy Castle (Ray Stevenson, proving that it's possible to play a lead with a single deadpan expression - unshaven, all in black, bristling with enough powerful weapons to make any member of the IRA jealous), ticked off at the Mafia because, in the 2nd flick, his family was gunned down while enjoying a picnic.

Anyway, early on he tosses one of the Mafia into a glass bottle grinder and turns it on. Crunch, chunk, squish, slush, oh, the blood & agony! The guy doesn't die (because, needing an opponent, the script says so). His face becomes a patchwork that would scare Frankenstein's monster. As Jigsaw, he's out to get revenge on the avenger. The rest of the time is spent on revealing how many ways blood can be splattered, heads can be sliced or crushed (or simply decapitated), etc., until one of the guys wins out. Guess which one.

A pity the unintentionally funny dialog (the more serious it gets, the funnier it gets) could not reach the level of brilliance as other members of the production crew, especially the editor, who held the whole thing together by threads. The trio of writers simply couldn't rise to the occasion with more than - from a dignified woman pointing a gun at Castle's head, "You! You're here? Where the fŠ did you come from?" He tries to respond, but the well bred female says, shoving the gun closer, "Shut the fŠ up!" While her little girl, bored with adult games, interrupts petulantly with, "Mommy, get me some crayons." - sheer genius!

Nor does director Lexi Alexander help any, though he is consistent, pushing everything - the action, the debauchery, the NY city types, the mayhem - so far to the extreme that one wonders if he intended this to be a ludicrous satire. On second thought, no, that would be expecting too much.