Punisher: War Zone

Frank Castle throws a mob captain into a glass-crushing machine, the man survives with his face in pieces, and names himself after the stitches.

It is a reboot rather than a sequel: new cast, new tone, no continuity with the 2004 film. Ray Stevenson plays Castle five years into the work, exhausted by it, and Lexi Alexander directs the violence with a cheerfulness that the previous two films carefully avoided.

The film is stylised on screen as War Zone: Punisher, and it was the first of two films produced under the Marvel Knights banner, which was set up for exactly this kind of smaller and harder adaptation.