Punisher: War Zone
What a strangely uneven movie this is. I’m not sure why Thomas Jayne wasn’t tapped for a sequel to the excellent Punisher film he made with John Travolta, but I was reasonably excited to see Ray Stevenson re-inventing the role. Stevenson was excellent as one of the stars of HBO’s Rome, and holds the distinction (at least in my mind) of having done the best commentary track I’ve ever heard an actor do.
(By contrast, the worst one was done by Nick Stahl for an episode of Carnivale. Stevenson is intelligent, informed, and actually seems to care about the shows he does, or at least he cared about Rome. Stahl spoke as if he were half stoned and had not even bothered to watch scenes of which he was not part. He had nothing to offer and, if I were watching the show with him in the room, I think I would want to punch him.)
There are spoilers hereafter, so don’t say you haven’t been warned. Punisher: War Zone could have been an excellent movie. It isn’t, but that isn’t because of Stevenson’s performance. He brings the appropriate sense of taciturn and determined tragedy to the character, which is necessary for us to believe in Frank Castle’s tortured drive to pursue his mission. He’s also believable enough in the action scenes, and they’ve deliberately made him up to ape the appearance of some of the more hardcore interpretations of the character in graphic novel form. (The slicked hair and body armor with collar are telltales.)
The script and the mood of the film, however, are choppy and poorly conceived. Straight away, the filmmakers attempt to invoke Frank’s sense of tortured self-hate by having him accidentally kill an undercover FBI agent — but of course The Punisher is one of those characters who is supposed to be morally unambiguous. Making a mistake of that type casts everything he does in doubt. The fact that the wife and daughter of the dead agent eventually come to see Castle as “one of the good guys” doesn’t absolve him of guilt for the crime, either; it’s as if everyone simply agrees to let the matter go.
The creation of the villain “Jigsaw” is a plot device that seems unnecessarily cruel, even for an avenging vigilante like Castle. When The Punisher deliberately switches on the machinery that runs a mob boss through a glass-crushing machine, it’s as if Stevenson, much to his own chagrin, understands that the act is necessary to further the plot of the film. Jigsaw and his brother (played by the always fun Doug Hutchison, who was “Percy” in The Green Mile and who, in a tragically bad wig, plays “Horace” on Lost) would be less distracting if they weren’t both affecting stereotypical Mob Guy accents. They’re parodies of themselves, and their only real moment comes when Jigsaw confides in his brother that seeing his reflection upsets him (and brother “Loony Bin Jim” smashes all the nearby mirrors out of sympathy).
The movie earned its R rating through frank, squishy, blood-splattered depictions of dead bad guys and innocents alike, with plenty of heads literally blown apart. The blood in this movie doesn’t splatter, actually, so much as it splashes. Heads explode with disturbing regularity; Microchip’s dead mother, murdered by Jigsaw and his brother, is reduced to little more than a seated neck stump. Castle himself blithely shotguns a mobster in the face while an FBI agent (played by a bewildered and underutilized Colin Salmon, who was the mercenary leader diced by a laser grid in Resident Evil) is attempting to arrest the man. This is perfectly in character for The Punisher and was actually a good moment — but of course the man’s entire face is blown off. We’re spared none of that, because the movie delights in showing us people being brutally maimed, cracked open, fractured, and otherwise screwed up.
The movie’s climax, with Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim raising an army of disparate street thugs who are only too eager to face the one man who’s murdered hundreds if not thousands of their fellow criminals, seems contrived and tacked on. It’s as if the writers knew they needed a final action sequence but couldn’t figure out how to make it part of the original plot, which gets winded about the time Jigsaw, in exchange for very unpersuasive immunity from prosecution, rolls over on the Russian buyers to whom he’s brokering an unspecified biological weapon (for resale to “…those ragheads in Queens”).
Overall, while I was entertained by the film, I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of it. I imagine this was the reaction of most audience members who had the misfortune of seeing this movie in the theater. I watched it on DVD during a bout of insomnia in the middle of the night, and while it didn’t put me to sleep, it wasn’t what I’d call “good.” Still, there’s food for thought here, if only as fodder for the ongoing Punisher legacy. I write novels in the action series that inspired The Punisher, so that has meaning for me. I just don’t think it will have much for most viewers, and that’s too bad.
I watched this film on showtime a few weeks back, and like a gruesome car accident, I couldn’t look away. It revelled in its over-the-top nature.
The last line of the film, which was funny, was even in bad taste.
The reason Tom Jane didnt do the sequel was, he committed to do that relentlessly depressing piece of dreck known as THE MIST.