Punisher War Zone

My friend is a huge fan of the Max Punisher series written by Garth Ennis. He loves the ultraviolence, and he loves the horribly black humor. He is disappointed, though, by the attempts to put Punisher on the big screen, especially the recent adaptation with Thomas Jane and John Travolta in it. So when the first screens and trailers started popping up for Punisher War Zone, in which our gun-happy Frank Castle is played by an older-looking man named Ray Stevenson, he got pretty excited.

From the trailers, it looked like it was trash, just a lot of blood and gore and bad music. So of course, being a fan of such things, I went along with him to see it.

There's not much plot to speak of. There never was much in the comics. Frank Castle's family was killed in the crossfire of a gang shooting going on in the park, and Frank lost his mind, picked up some guns, donned a black shirt with a skull on the front, and started killing every single criminal he came across while avoiding being arrested. Character development? What's that? Sure, we see Frank get all pissed and brooding when he accidently shoots down an undercover FBI agent, and we get to see his softer side when he's around the aforementioned dead FBI guy's wife and daughter, but that's about it. I know my friend does not read the comics for some kind of Shakespearian, life-changing experience. He just wants the blood and violence, and so did I.

That said, this movie is VERY violent, with lots of hilariously gory deaths. I can't decide which I enjoyed more, the guy getting a chair leg shoved through his face early in the movie (it shows the clip in the red band trailer if you look it up) or the guy somersaulting through the air getting blown to pieces by a rocket while his two buddies look on in horror. Both kills seem to defy the laws of physics (as do many of the deaths in this film), but I don't care. There's more to pick from, as the movie has a high bodycount. It's great, and it's entertaining for sick people like myself.

The soundtrack is terrible. There was a particular, childish thing that would play in almost every scene with the little girl, and I wanted to stab my eardrums with something every time I heard it. The heavy metal bits they picked for the soundtrack too are quite terrible. But it's made tolerable by all the gunshots and screaming.

I think Ray Stevenson is the best Punisher role I've encountered. No, I never saw the other two movies (and people forget the 80's Dolph Lundgren movie even happened), but Ray is how I always thought Frank Castle should be: quiet, calculating, swift and to-the-point in his kills, an older man with a sly jet-black sense of humor, and decked out in body armor and guns. Well, okay, the hanging upside-down from a spinning chandelier shooting up mobsters bit in the beginning was a bit too much, but everything else he does, he gets right. The fact that he's a bit older-looking is great, too. And did I mention I like the body armor?

The main villain in this one is Jigsaw, a gangster who got his face ripped to shreds after Frank dropped him into a big...glass recycling machine...thing, and turned it on. Hoo boy was that painful to look at. What exactly it is he's doing isn't clear, something about a new crazy drug and a deal with the Russians, but mostly he's out to get revenge on Punisher for fucking his face up, and he wants to kill the wife and daughter of dead FBI man, thinking they have money that he's missing. Or something. Plot? What's that? That said, the guy who plays Jigsaw puts on a show. He hams it up and, like his fellow gangsters, speaks in the worst clichéd Bronx accent known to man. His brother "Loony Bin Jim" isn't much better, but they're both kind of entertaining. It's just...I was expecting someone more threatening, more vile, someone who actually posed more of a threat to Frank. But then we wouldn't have gotten that wonderful scene of Jigsaw delivering a motivational "let's team up and kill the Punisher" speech to a gang of black thugs while a screen with a billowing American flag plays in the background, and that for me was a highlight of the movie.

All that said, Punisher Warzone is precisely what I was expecting (and hoping for): Ultraviolent, trashy cinema with a lot of dark laughs. It isn't the greatest movie ever, it will not win any awards, unless someone out there offers an award for the greatest amount of terrible neon lighting ever used in a film, which there are copious amounts of.

So it depends on your tastes, but really, you could do a whole lot worse. You could go see Twilight or some shit.

[Brett]