Is it seriously that hard
to make a decent Punisher movie? Really? The Marvel Comics anti-hero is pretty
much simplicity itself: After watching the gangland murder of his family, Frank
Castle goes nuts, dons a T-shirt with a skull on it, and kills every bad guy in
sight. Figure out a way to throw in some decent action scenes, temper it with
some hand-wringing about the cost of revenge, find the right unsmiling face to
play the guy with the guns, add explosions. Bang. There's your movie. And yet Punisher:
War Zone
is the third attempt to bring the Punisher to the big screen—it follows two
different movies called The Punisher, 1989's low-budget Dolph Lundgren effort, and a
bigger-deal 2004 movie starring Thomas Jane and
John Travolta. Neither of those films made good on the seemingly simple task of
translating one of the comic-book world's simplest characters.
Punisher:
War Zone at least trades up in Punishers. Rome's Ray Stevenson has the right mix of
imposing bulk and sensitivity to look simultaneously hurt and pissed while
blowing the brains out of bad guys. He's joined by another slumming former HBO
star, The Wire's
Dominic West, who spends most of the film sporting cut-rate deformo makeup as
the bad guy.
Their presence doesn't
suggest the class of this movie so much as the difficulty that cable actors
have finding decent roles when their shows end; this is junk, a bunch of hard-R
action scenes kept together by the thinnest of plots. Which would be fine if it
were entertaining junk, but the parade of dimly lit skull explosions grows old
quickly, and director Lexi Alexander (Green Street Hooligans) brings neither energy
nor gravity to the over-the-top violence, which would feel excessive if the
film knew the meaning of the word excess. It's a joyless plunge into gunfire
that doesn't even know how to draw blood.