Brutally Repugnant Punisher a Senseless Abomination
Ever want to see a man get suddenly stabbed clean through the adam’s apple by the broken stem of a wine glass? Ever been curious what an exploding urban parkour enthusiast street villain would look like? Ever thought to yourself, wouldn’t it be cool if a Marvel superhero could punch clean through another man’s skull? While watching Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo earlier this year, did you silently think the violence in that blood-splattered spectacle was far too tame and should have been even more extreme?
Ray Stevenson makes Dolph Lundgren look good in Lionsgate Films' Punisher: War Zone
If you answered in the affirmative to all these questions, then by golly Punisher: War Zone is the motion picture for you. If ever a movie crystallized the almost comical hypocrisy of the Motion Picture Association of America (they’re the governing body who decide upon each film’s rating) where it comes to sex and violence, this has to be it. There is so much over-the-top gore-drenched nihilistic masochism going in this comic book tale of vengeance the whole thing makes the Saw sequels look like episodes of “Sesame Street,” and if it wasn’t all so repugnant I’d be hard-pressed not to call it downright genius.
And I mean that in the most irredeemable sort of ways. This not-really-a-sequel sequel to Lionsgate’s 2004 attempt to bring Frank Castle, a.k.a. The Punisher (“Rome” star Ray Stevenson now, Deep Blue Sea beefcake Thomas Jane then), to life is so fantastically awful, so unbelievably ludicrous, so completely obsessed with its own disemboweling brutality it could just be the most unintentionally hilarious film I’ve seen this year.
Director Lexi Alexander, who supposedly crafted a tough-minded winner with 2005’s Green Street Hooligans (which I admit to still not having seen), completely drops the ball with this. The acting is universally awful (Dominic West, playing the disfigured super villain Jigsaw, winning the award for the year’s worst accent), the script is a complete disaster and the film looks like it was photographed through a filter compiled of recycled used industrial truck tires. The film is edited without a single thought to pacing or continuity, and by the time the climax rolls around things make so little sense – and are so beyond the absurdly laughable – the only rational thing to do is treat the darn thing as an episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and let the vitriolic lampooning of the sucker rip with unabashed enthusiasm.
The only winners in all this are the men and women behind all the truly spectacular gore effects. For as truly horrible as this movie is as a whole, the imagination involved in the staging of the various (and numerous) deaths throughout the film is almost without par. If a picture were to win awards for how magnificently it impaled a dreadlocked convenience store robber or spectacularly it beheaded indignant elderly mob bosses then Punisher: War Zone would make a clean sweep of the evening.
Listen, I’ve never been squeamish about my fondness for B-movie gore. I’ll extol the virtues of Seth Gordon, Dario Argento and George A. Romero (even if the latter two have sadly become mere shells of the former selves) until the cows come home. But as inane and as silly as the best of their pictures got they still maintained a semblance of filmmaking dignity impossible to dismiss. The short of it is that these three men knew (and in the case of Gordon, as Stuck ably proves, still knows) how to make fully formed movies, not just idiotic splatter reels.
That’s all that Punisher: War Zone is, after all, and as calling card for those responsible for its winning makeup and special effects this one is about as good as it gets. In every other way imaginable, however, this movie stinks so badly the stench is noticeable a good twenty miles away from the theater, the only ones getting their painfully ludicrous comeuppance the daft ticket buyers woefully tricked into paying to see it.
Film Rating: ê (out of 4)
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