… and that name is ‘shite’.
Punisher: War Zone is seemingly unrelated to any prior Punisher films, including the Dolph Lundgren nightmare and the 2004 film that I found entertaining despite my better judgment. Here is a film that takes only two elements from either of those films, choosing to forge it’s own ultra-violent, ultra-noisy path.
It chose wrong.
Horribly wrong.
The characters are as carefully drawn and realized as a 60s Batman episode extra role and a plot that is as hardhitting and frank as an E Channel interview with Beyonce.
The best part of this decision is that there is enough distance between the 2004 Punisher and this cinematic skidmark, the worst thing is that this film is what it is, a turgid whirlwind of violence not bothering with justification or reason.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against violence in film – far from it – but where the 2004 showed one of the more (admittedly over the top) compelling reasons for a vengeance spree War Zone makes only a passing mention of earlier unpleasantness before the gleeful and brutal bloodletting, with severed arteries gushing aplenty and snapped necks and body parts dismembered galore.
The plot revolves around…
…
Ummm…
Forget the plot. He’s angry. War Zone follows the Frank Castle AKA The Punisher as he sets about putting rest to his sadness by mercilessly slaughtering anyone who has ever sinned. Things escalate – like they needed to? – when he inadvertently kills an undercover FBI agent which puts them and the police on his trail. Now the law of averages says that if you kill hundreds eventually an innocent will walk into the line of fire, I also understand that the authorities would be miffed at the death of ‘one of their own’, but surely a man who has killed so many would be on the radar already???
So Castle hunts the bad guys who are hunting HIM, with the FBI and cops floundering along behind putting tags on the toes of casualties. There is a cold and callous lack of any semblance of logic here, good guys are good and need protection, the bad guys and anyone siding with them are bad and need killing, there is more parkour, my current overdone bugbear, more lead than a Chinese toy factory and less braincells than a small gathering of Kardashians.
Ray Stevenson snarls appropriately enough as Castle, though this role singlehandedly nullifies any goodwill he earned in the TV series Rome, and no-one else in the film should be surprised if this remains the final entry on their imdb page.
Yes, it is THAT bad.
Final Rating – 4 / 10. When parents lament the puerile violent tripe that they assume their kids are watching, it is this that they are referencing.
