The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>"Man on Fire" was everything "The Punisher" tried to be.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>I haven't seen Punisher, but Man on Fire was a damn good sleeper movie...didn't really make much noise in the theatres, but it was damn good</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Agreed! I watched it just last night and was very pleasantly surprised. Denzel was one bad Mofo.</div>

Just watched it tonight. Definately one of Denzel's better roles. I liked watching him blow shit up. The direction and camera work was top-notch, too.

HATED this film. I just found it so dour, so small, so vicious. I enjoyed the Punisher as a sort of comedy/ horrible violence romp. This, I didn't dig.

Andrew, Killer Bee wrote:HATED this film. I just found it so dour, so small, so vicious. I enjoyed the Punisher as a sort of comedy/ horrible violence romp. This, I didn't dig.

Much like me with Titanic, because you enjoyed The Punisher, your opinion is null and void on Man on Fire :-) (Note: smiley face = joke)

The Punisher wasn't just bad, it was god-awful. It epitomized everything you don't want to do when you make a comic-book based movie (ie. take A LOT of liberties, ignore the entire history of the comic and take only those very basic elements that you want, and toss in a bunch of garbage, Hollywood formula crap because you think it's "going to make the story better" and "attract a wider audience"). If I tried, I couldn't have possibly made a worse comic book adaptation than The Punisher. It was very, very painful, but I watched it to the end just to see how badly they were gonna destroy the character.

Let's just say he can NEVER come back from the dead on screen now.....

Frankly, I liked both movies. Are you sure you didn't watch the Dolph Lundgren version?

Haven't seen the punisher, but Man on Fire was something I had high expectations for but it missed in so many different areas. Didn't Steve McQueen do a film similar to this? Isn't it a remake? Just curious. Anyway, Dakota Fanning is well on her way of being an excellent actress, she truely can act, but the problem with this film was Denzel's character was just empty. Yeah it's cool he blows the shit out of people and objects, but I liked Spartan better than this film.

That was sorta the point. He was an empty broken character that didn't have much to live for.