You Will Be Punished: Review of Punisher: War Zone

Where to begin? First, I suppose, a series of caveats is appropriate: I am not, you see, reviewing Punisher: War Zone, in its entirety. Such would imply that I found said entirety, bearable, which I most assuredly did not. In order to relieve my annoyance at paying $11.50 for two tickets to this film (more about it later), reviewer and companion left the theater about midway through and snuck in to watch the second half of Quantum of Solace again, because that movie was entertaining; this follow-up was akin to chasing the half you could stomach of a very bad meal with a good, strong cocktail, or tasty dessert, or antacid, or anything else at all that might help to purge the effects of consuming something repellant.

A second caveat: Since it seems all the rage for angry defenders of bad films to make ad hominem attacks on the reviewer’s general taste in film (and often other things), I will declare several reasons that I did not have for disliking this film to the point of abandoning it in abject dismay. I did not leave because I dislike violence or bloodshed in film. I liked the hell out of 300; I enjoyed Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan—heck, I even thought the first Saw was an interesting enough statement movie. So stylized killing is just fine by me. I did not leave because I dislike comic book movies; I love comic book movies. Just this year I’ve been a happy consumer of The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I even read The Punisher comics as a teen, so I “get it” just fine: the story of a badass commando turned vigilante by the murder of his family has, in comic book form, a refreshingly brutal simplicity. Since I am an amateur film reviewer, I could have chosen to see any movie, and I chose this one. I wanted to like it—really.

No, I left Punisher: War Zone because it is one of the worst films I have ever seen. There was simply nothing redeeming about it at all, unless a lot of shooting and dying that has been done better in a million other films counts as redeeming, in which case the viewer really needs to raise his standards a bit. The college freshman I teach frequently write better lines than the grieving widow of a federal agent mistakenly killed by The Punisher (listlessly and humorlessly portrayed by Ray Stevenson, who also can’t hide an Anglo-Irish accent in playing this quintessentially American antihero) asking him, “Who punishes you?”; high school productions of Shakespeare (dire endeavors, all) feature better delivery of lines (although Olivier couldn’t do much with this script); the average Halloween party sports makeup as good as that featured on the villainous mobster Jigsaw, disfigured in a Punisher-engineered industrial accident. The cinematography is mediocre, the plot, aside from some vague and nondescript hinting at a biological weapons shipment, nonexistent (at least for as long as I could wait for it), the suspense curiously missing, the suspension of disbelief required to get though a single scene stupefying (I mean, sure, it’s New York, but—no one notices guy in Kevlar and full combat regalia walking through the subway?). The film simply does nothing right.

In this cinematic era of successful remakes and franchise reboots, ranging from zombies to spies to superheroes, the most compelling question to ask of director Lexi Alexander and trio of screenwriters Nick Santora, Art Marcum, and Matt Halloway is: why? The legacy of Batman needed rehabilitation after the increasingly stupid third and fourth installments following Tim Burton’s capable 1989 goth frolic—and so it has been. The Hulk needed to do some proper smashing after Ang Lee’s introspective twaddle—and it came to pass. What the makers of this film thought it might have achieved that previous, also terrible, attempts to bring Frank Castle and his grudge to the big screen did not is anyone’s guess. What they have produced is something that may well make viewers squirm in embarrassment for everyone involved in its production: an R-rated film for twelve year old boys, a marketing trick that requires some bending of local laws to be successful. If the opening weekend returns (4 million on a 35 million production budget) are indicative of the success of this gambit, it would appear that not nearly enough of them have crept past the teens guarding the ticket turnstiles.