THE PUNISHER is many things, but a good movie is not one of them. It is an extended trip to an abattoir. It is a script that makes no sense whatsoever. It is an unsightly mélange of genres trapped in a steel-cage death match. But worst of all, it’s a wasted opportunity. In Ray Stevenson, the Punisher of the piece, we have an actor capable of doing more than pulling a trigger or delivering a death blow. This is a guy who not only looks fabulous wearing an expression that is equal parts ticked off and grimly determined while taking out the bad guys, give the Punisher an inner life as turbulent as the vengeance he wreaks on evildoers who have somehow escaped the legal system. Though his character has gone beyond the moral bounds of the law, Stevenson makes him a vigilante who is still capable of being wounded psychically, whether by pulling the trigger on the wrong person, or by the trusting way a little girl takes his hand.
The wrong person is an undercover FBI agent that The Punisher, AKA Frank Castle, wastes while taking out a crime family. The remorse he feels makes him want to get out of the vigilante biz altogether, until the crime boss (Dominic West) he thought he’d killed in a glass recycler (one enjoys the nod to going green) was only badly maimed. Even then, it’s not so much that he’s still alive, and going by the name Jigsaw, as much as it is that Jigsaw is going after the FBI agent’s comely widow (Julie Benz) and adorable little daughter (Stephanie Janusauskas).
The story is little more than an excuse for the slaughter of many accompanied by fountains of blood and the insistent report of high decibel gunfire punctuated with an occasional rocket blast. It starts with a decapitation and ups the ante from there. Many bad guys strut across the screen, usually just before being killed ways that are gory and repetitive. When someone was killed by a wineglass stem, the novelty was almost a tonic. Russians, Chinese, Irish, Skinheads, and Italians are all just so much fodder for one another and for Frank. For levity there is Frank’s co-conspirator, Micro (Wayne Knight), spoonfeeding his catatonic mother while explaining how he has trumped the police initiative to buy guns from thugs. As for the police, there is Soap (Dash Mihok), the doofus in charge of bringing The Punisher to justice, and Budiansky (Colin Salmon), the dead FBI agent’s slick partner with a troubled past, who is even more motivated to bring The Punisher in, though he doesn’t inspire a spirit of cooperation with the NYPD by calling them Krispy Kremes™. West goes over the top and from there clears the troposphere making his character less menacing than annoyingly loopy beneath a face that looks like a badly made quilt. Even tossing in a crazy brother with a taste for human flesh doesn’t increase the creepy factor. Said brother (Doug Hutchison) seems to be going through the motions of insanity, which is perhaps the single worst way to play it in this context or any other.
In fact, there are so many tones at work in the non-script that the only suspense is in wondering what genre will be used (badly) next. Neither camp nor cold-blooded win the day, and before it’s all over, maudlin and hip have entered the fray only to retreat as bloody and broken as the endless stream of evil henchmen who bite the dust during the 107-minute running time.
THE PUNISHER: WAR ZONE makes a stab at social commentary and at a meditation on the need for revenge that lurks in the darkest part of human nature. It backs off, though, before returning to the mayhem at hand, leaving barely a trace of what might have redeemed it.
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