The Punished (2018)

Rene Perez...ouch.

He does this thing where--in his more entertaining movies--when someone gets shot there's an enormous blast of watery blood that you would expect to find in a video game. This one does that. So from the get-go it's off to a good start.

It's a Rene Perez trope. People don't bleed in his movies, they explode blood-water.

Unfortunately what is also a trope is that no one seems to know how to handle a gun, so how they hit anything is beyond on. My fiance and her friends had the unfortunate curse of growing up in the suburbs near Chicago, and even on video games that use toy guns, they can't seem to hit anything. The people in Perez movies handle firearms the same way... like people that have never handled a firearm before.

That is an unfortunate fact given that this is a film that was intended to me a Marvel's Punisher knock-off.

But a knock-off with little action, a horrible script that is delivered atrociously, with a cardboard cast. It's painful.

In other words, it really, REALLY stinks. Most of the time when movies like this know they are bad they up the gore, up the comedy, up the nudity, do something, anything to make the film watchable... but not Perez, he'll make a bad movie and not try to salvage it in any way.