Punisher: War Zone (2008) Directed by Lexi Alexander
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Terribly Awesome By Fearless Young Orphan Punisher: War Zone (2008) Directed by Lexi Alexander Punisher: War Zone received a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve read very few graphic novels and I don’t know crap about the Punisher. So whether or not Punisher: War Zone gets the story or the characters right or whatever-the-hell graphic novel geeks might complain about, I couldn’t say. The Punisher is Frank Castle, vigilante who used to be a special-forces cop until his family (requisite beautiful wife, two- and-a-half children and a dog named Dave, perhaps) was murdered by mobsters. Now he lives in a sewer and kills mobsters willy-nilly. The cops, insofar as the movie is concerned, feel obligated to stop him but don’t try very hard, because they appreciate the fact that he’s cleaning up the streets. Think Batman only without the swank mansion and string of beautiful paramours, and with absolutely no restraint. Batman might actually deliver a few criminals to the cops every now and then; the Punisher just kills everybody on the spot. In the parameters of the movie, we ignore the fact that what Frank Castle is doing is illegal and immoral. He’s a murderer. He doesn’t kill a few conspicuously evil kingpins; no, he kills them and anyone else in the vicinity. Vigilante justice is not justice, unless you’re in a movie, and then it’s a respectable occupation. But it’s a messy one too, and finally Frank shoots one too many men without asking questions first, and discovers to his horror that he has killed a deep-cover cop. The deep-cover cop has the required beautiful widow and adorable daughter too, so Castle can feel even more guilty than before. Because one thing that you don’t want to do, is hurt the feelings of beautiful women and adorable children. Plain women and ugly kids, who cares? So Castle takes on the obligation of protecting them from the two mobsters who have managed to escape him thus far, Jigsaw and his brother Looney Bin Jim. Jigsaw wasn’t always called Jigsaw, at least not until the Punisher dropped him into a big glass- crushing machine that crunched his beautiful face to pieces, resulting in some less-than- satisfactory plastic surgery, and a dead plastic surgeon (think Batman again, only this time, the first Tim Burton Batman movie where Jack Nicholson turns green). Looney Bin Jim wins some kind of contest for having the coolest movie name I’ve ever heard! The pair of them are the villains here and, you know, surround themselves by minions so the Punisher has many people to kill. The plot is dreadfully predictable and cliché, and the dialog is even worse. You just can’t believe the stupid things everybody says, straight out of The Big Book of Tough Guy Talk. At first glance, as we’ll discuss momentarily, the acting seems mostly subpar (the performers are either unskilled or uninterested), so they say all the stupid things badly, too. And so, with all these complaints, imagine my surprise to find myself totally enjoying and even admiring Punisher: War Zone. Would you like to know why? Here comes the list of five things to like: 1, 2, and 3. The movie looks, sounds, and feels just like a graphic novel. Visually it’s intriguing, often amazing-looking, dark and gritty, full of blood and extreme violence. There’s hardly an important shot here that couldn’t be effectively and beautifully drawn in ink. And these characters, with their lousy acting and stupid dialog, are not real people but sketched characters. I thought it over and realized that whether or not it was intentional, all of the scenes of dialog and interaction come across like scenes lifted straight out of a graphic novel, even down to the strongly-caricatured villains and good- guys. A strange phenomenon occurs here: if I think of this as a “movie” I sneer and think it kind of sucks; if I consider it as filmed graphic novel, suddenly it feels . dare I say it? Almost brilliant. 4. Ray Stevenson. This is a man with screen presence. He stars as Frank Castle and is one of those rare types who can say lines like, “I’m already far down that road,” as if they’re not stupid things to say. I like him. He’s big, tall, tough, striking-looking without being handsome, maybe not smart but very, very resourceful. I have seen Stevenson do a great job with similar roles in the HBO series Rome and the film The Book of Eli, and I anticipate seeing a lot more of him. He can be an action movie star, easily. 5. An impressive array of cathartic violence with lots of big fancy guns. You know, sometimes I just like to see a goofy movie full of fightin’ and shootin’. This certainly fits the bill. It’s very violent, and there’s way too much of the disemboweling, burning alive, beheading kind of action for the faint of heart. If you can disengage yourself enough to view it as the cartoon it is meant to be, then this should not be a problem. If you can’t, you might want to hide your eyes. Anyway I thought the fight scenes were fun to watch. Ray Stevenson can be thanked again for his role in this, as his Punisher is like a big, loud angel of death, imbued not with superpowers but with awesome rage. Think Batman, only with awesome rage instead of angst. Punisher: War Zone got a 26% at rottentomatoes.com. If you don’t care for dumb violent action movies or graphic novels or the stylistic combination of both, then 26% might even be rather high – this would probably rank at a 10% or less for most such people. However, after considering, I’m going to shock myself into giving this stupid/brilliant film an 80% on the Orphan-o-meter. It’s bad, but wonderfully bad, and it’s so much like a graphic novel that I suspect there was something sly and ingenious going on in the minds of those who put it together. Or at least, I love to think there was, and therefore I choose to believe it. .