Questionably Content

Punisher: War Zone (2008)


Directed by: Lexi Alexander

Starring: Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Doug Hutchinson

Other Actors of Note: Wayne Knight

Plot: After hunting down and killing hundreds of violent criminals, Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, faces his most deadly foe yet: Jigsaw.

It's no coincidence that he looks like Steven Seagal here.

I didn't know what to expect coming into this movie. Having not seen anything by Lexi Andrews, anything with Ray Stevenson, or even a trailer my mind was pretty blank walking into this one. Still, I wasn't quite expecting this.

This is the second Punisher reboot following the criminally underrated and misunderstood (we'll get to that in a minute) 2004 movie starring Thomas Jane and a phoned in John Travolta and an 80s movie starring Dolph 'Drago' Lundgren which is actually a decent film so long as you pretend it's not supposed to be an adaptation of the comic book.

Anyway Ray Stevenson is Frank Castle AKA the Punisher a vigilante with a chip on his shoulder and a stick up his ass who either broods, mopes, or tears shit up. He used to have emotions but he doesn't anymore (I'm fairly certain he killed them. With his bare hands.) His family died at a picnic when they witnessed a mob killing and he was reported dead too but he wasn't dead and nobody found out because... that's never really explained. Anyway Frank is so downtrodden over the loss of his family that he beats anything even resembling crime into a bloody sauce. He's so intimidating that villains only ever shoot him in his kevlar vest, he's also 8 and a half feet tall and made of rusty steel, he has barbed wire for teeth, chainsaws for fingers, and Tom Selleck for a cock.

Anyway the badguy from "300" (the one that looks like Mark Wahlberg, not the oen that looks like Dhalsim) aka Dominic West aka Billy "The Beaut" Rissoti is a mobster that is very vane and tends to check himself out in the mirror all the time. (Gee, I wonder if he ends up horribly scarred and ugly later in the movie as a half-assed lesson about the dangers of vanity, hmm)

Well the Punisher crashes this big mob party and kills people so quickly and brutally that Jason Voorhees would either be proud or jealous. (He cuts a guy's head off with one swipe from a kabar, I mean I know they're sharp but come on) But Billy gets away and Frank tracks him to a recycling plant.

He then kills, like, fucking everybody and tosses Billy into a big glass recycling machine and turns it on where it strangely enough only tears his face to shit rather than turning him into cole slaw. Naturally he comes back with a vengence, kills some people, holds a woman and child hostage, kidnaps Newman, and has a crazy brother (aptly named Loony Bin Jim as he is in an asylum and is named Jim) who he breaks out. Also there's some Jamaican guy and his partners that figure into this whole mess somehow (It's Maginty from the Punisher Max series but there's really no reason for him to even be in the movie) but they're pretty superflous.

Magnum PInis

Ray Stevenson looks the part of Frank Castle just like Steve Dillon draws him as a weird combination of Steven Seagal and Clive Owen. Unfortunately since Ray Stevenson has all the eloquent speech patterns of Lou Ferigno he doesn't even utter a single word until about 20 minutes into the movie (thus further enforcing the Jason comparison) and seeing as how Ennis' overly tedious monologue that rivaled that of anything from "Sin City" can't be spoken by Frank he reads more like The Saint of Killers with a skull painted on his chest. I'm told Stevenson can act which is why I'm wondering why he didn't do much of it at all during this movie. He mostly just looks alternatively bored or mopey for the entire film. The big problem is we see that Frank was a happy family man but mostly he just seems like a major cunt and you don't believe that he was once a decent guy just maybe a slightly lesser cunt.

Dominic West in much the same way that Heath Ledger beat the hell out of Christian Bale's remarkably unremarkable performance in "The Dark Knight" is the real show stopper here. Jigsaw is waaaaay beyond over the top and even kind of comes close to Ledger's Joker in tone and style. My big problem with West's performance was his accent, his Italian accent sounded fake but then again that may have been intentional given the style of this movie. Jigsaw looks something like a cross between Mason Verger and Leatherface and actually kind of acts like that as well. Jigsaw's origin has been changed to Frank accidently not killing him after dropping him into a glass bottle recycler (because apparently having The Punisher filet his face with a combat knife was deemed too family friendly.)

Doug Hutchinson (AKA the dick-head prison guard from "The Green Mile") plays Jigsaw's brother Loony Bin Jim. If West's accent was bad Hutchinson's is far worse and his job is mainly to kill off characters in the most batshit crazy ways possible and inflict physical harm upon himself, you know, just 'cause. Still, however pointless the character is, Hutchinson plays him well.

Wayne Knight (AKA Newman from Seinfeld) plays Linus Lieberman AKA MicroChip a character that hasn't been seen in the comics since the 90s, mostly because he kinda sucked and was only really there to answer the ever present question of "Where the fuck does he get all these guns?" Thus the character has been relegated to "likeable side-kick who will die before this movie ends." No less, Knight (an actor who I have liked in.... hmm... nothing) actually does a really good job (though he seems to be channeling Penn Jillette) and manages to be likeable (which is no small feat seeing as I hate both character and actor.)

Dash Mihok plays Martin Soap, a character that will be more than familiar to people like me who lovingly recall Garth Ennis' run on Marvel Knights Punisher. Mihok plays the character near perfectly he's just as much of an unlucky doofus as is expected the problem is while the character starts out like he did in the comics we find out he's actually an ally of the Punisher which kinda bothered me (probably more than it should have, really) especially since there obviously won't be a Daredevil around constantly trying to throw Frank in jail.

T.J. Storm plays a Maginity, a lover of parkour who is 1/2 Jamaican and 1/2 Irish (and 1/2 Pirate judging by the horrible accent) and plays a role of no importance at all in this movie. You thought Harry Heck and The Russian were pointless fan-service? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Frank Castle once beat Chuck Norris. To death. With Jean Claude Van Damme.

Okay let's get this out of the way since you cunts are going to whine about this review anyway. The 2004 version was still a better movie. I get to hear oh so much about how "it wasn't really the Punisher" and "Thomas Jane spends most of the movie whining and drinking" and "he spends more time breaking up Howard Saint's marriage than killing people" bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

First of all, the 2004 film was an origin story as many times as the Punisher has been changed and brought back his origin has only been covered in detail one time and even that was pretty piss-poor (It was the 70s after all.)

No, Thomas Jane's character was not The Punisher, he was Frank Castle. He didn't actually become the Punisher until the end of the movie (in fact if you would shut your goddamn cock holster and listen Jane's last lines: "Frank Castle is dead, I am The Punisher" spell it out for you in blue crayon) it's a detailing of his journey for revenge ultimately culminating in him losing any spark of compassion and humanity he had left and essentially becoming a modernized version of "The Man With No Name" with just a tiny bit of Travis Bickle sprinkled in there to make it intersting. Yes he drank and he moped and he felt like shit, but come on his entire extended fucking family just died like two months ago give the guy some time for Christ sake. He could have just instantly gone emotionless and became The Punisher but that's something that industry buffs call "Bad writing."

And yes, Frank didn't kill Quentin Glass or Olivia Saint but seeing as neither of them actually killed his family and it was Howard Saint he really had the beef with for calling out the order he was not simply content to kill everyone he loved, he wanted to make it hurt especially bad so he set it up to where Howard did the dirty work and thus realized he had killed the people he loved in cold blood. (It would have had better effect if John Travolta wasn't such a terrible fucking actor.)

Now if you liked Punisher Max, you'll probably like Stevenson. He reads as a Steven Seagal character which is pretty much how Garth Ennis writes Frank Castle. He kills bad people, that's pretty much it. I have never been pleased with that aspect of Ennis' take on the character as it's rather shallow, particularly from a writer who pulled 1/6 of a comic series on the characterization of someone called "Arseface." I've always felt that versioin of the Punisher was weak, but if you're an Ennis fanboy or you just don't like to complicate your action heroes with all those pussy feelings than Stevenson is the man for you. (The honestly Stevenson spends far more time moping around than Jane did, at least Jane had the decency to drink while doing it, half the time I expected Stevenson to be balled up in the corner cranking Linkin Park so hard his ears bled.)

"Punisher: War Zone" is more gory than "Rambo" (I feat I didn't expect to be achieved, at least not this soon), more overstylized than "The Dark Knight", and more over-the top and cheesy than "Shoot 'Em Up."

It's essentially Punisher MAX mixed with the old Punisher: War Journal comics from the 80s and 90s. All the dialogue is horribly written (They actually managed to top "God's gonna sit this one out!") and every single scene is fraut with camp. Of course this isn't a bad thing, but what's troubling is there's a fair amount of the movie that is supposed to be taken seriously.

The style of the writing is almost straight up Garth Ennis, the problem is while that works in print it doesn't work so much in movies. Ennis' style goes from surreally ridiculous to deadly serious in the blink of an eye and while this works in comics it's not so succesful acted out. Oh sure there's a lot of moments that just come as a surprise and crap all over typical action movie traditions but at the same time it uses a fair amount of them. (I swear the director consulted the Steven Seagal Guide to Action Sequences more than once on this one.)

It's also painfully obvious this is a Lionsgate film by the cinematography, the over-the-top gore, and the fact that Jigsaw's origin looks like something out of one of the "Saw" films. It's dark, every frame is usually saturated with a lot of red or green side lighting and if they go five minutes without someone dying horribly then something's wrong.

Much like Tim Bradstreet's art portfolio, google images was filled with nothin but pictures of The Punisher looking broody and ashy all shrouded in shadows.

"Punisher: War Zone" is a fun cheesy action movie that unfortunately aspires to be more than that. It's fun but little else, relying more on guns and gusto than character development or plot, it's too hard to take seriously when you're supposed to. No less it's not a bad movie just not particularly great and it makes me miss Thomas Jane.

I give "Punisher: War Zone" a 4 out of 5. It's worth seeing.