Column:
'Punisher' is punishing to watch
Published Dec. 8, 2008
What a disgusting, empty-headed whitesploitation movie this is.
"Punisher: War Zone" is an exploitive film that doesn't seem to know why it's doing what it does in the pursuit of the next dark, drearily filmed action sequence. Put out by Marvel's new outlet for "dark," "mature" films, it has mistaken darkness for "Saw"-like torture porn and maturity for a revenge plot that would be half-baked if anybody had even bothered putting it in the oven. It's not just a failure but a failure that will make you feel worse about movies than when you bought your ticket. So don't buy your ticket.
The "Punisher" back-story should be common knowledge by now, since this is the third movie reboot since the 1989 original. Frank Castle — played here by Ray Stevenson — is a man whose family, having accidentally witnessed a mob hit, is executed in front of him. Left for dead, he forges a new identity as a vigilante, killing organized criminals as quickly and ruthlessly as he can. As "War Zone" begins, he's killing some mobsters when he accidentally takes out an undercover FBI agent, and now he must kill the vaguely supervillainous Jigsaw, a low-rent mafioso Joker, before Jigsaw exacts his revenge on the agent's family, which very conveniently reminds Castle of his own.
Somewhere there might be a good movie in that, but the exposition has long since become an excuse for Z-list directors to kill lots of people on-screen. This Punisher is only occasionally interested in consequences and is certainly more of a superhero than a self-styled vigilante has any reason to be. When his dead family appears, the results seem calculating and artificial, middle-class trappings set out exclusively to avoid the need to tackle any real questions of motivation or morality. He's a cipher holding a series of progressively larger guns.
Speaking of ciphers, the director, Lexi Alexander, is unable to hold for more than five minutes onto any cogent idea or theme or even look for the film. There's no cohesive tone here — one can only imagine that she's written "be badass" next to some scenes on the script, and "you're sad now" next to others — so one minute the Punisher will be driving a chair leg through someone's skull, or punching clean through a mobster's face, and the next Wayne Knight or a bumbling, sycophantic cop will be paraded across the screen for some incongruent comic relief.
In the end the only thing holding this film together into some kind of whole product is its awfulness, its complete incompetence when it comes to understanding the inner workings of characters so simple and shallow as comic-book superheroes. The final product is not just bad but repellent; there's nobody to root for, no cathartic moment to wait for at the end of its cartoonish violence. All the characters are stained by the morass of the movie, and when it finally ends, after a truly bizarre stab at a funny tag scene, the only catharsis to be had is reading about its complete box-office collapse on the Internet.