• Wide Release
• Director: Lexi Anderson
• Written by: Nick Santora, Matt Holloway, Art Marcum
• Running Time: 103 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: R - Restricted
• Cast: Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Doug Hutchison, Colin Salmon, Wayne Knight, Julie Benz, Dash Mihok, Stephanie Janusauskas, Mark Camacho, Romano Orzari, Keram Malicki-Sánchez, Larry Day, Ron Lea, Tony Calabretta, T.J. Storm, Carlos Gonzalez-vlo, David Vadim, John Dunn-Hill, Niko Nikolov, Aubert Pallascio, Pat Fry, Francis B. Goldberg, Linda Smith, Robert Harrop, Lynne De Bel, Bill Hall, Matt Holland, Bjanka Murgel, James Murray, Brent Skagford, Kane Chan, Cas Anvar, Ethan Gould, Michael Paterson, Matthew Chan, Steven P. Park, Edward Yankie, Tracy Jerome Phillips, Giovanni Cipolla, Andrew Farmer, Jean-Loup Yale, Miro Bedard, Edouard Keller, Marco Desjean, Lise Sita, Nick Sita, Oleg Popkov, Eric Dauphin, Stéphane Byl, Jon Barton

Harkening back to the grindhouse era in both style and substance, “Punisher: War Zone” is the most fun I’ve had at a Hollywood movie since, well, Tarantino’s “Grindhouse”. Like those iniquitous films of yesteryear, Lexi Anderson’s cinematic opus piles on the camp and savage excess in heaping helpings, eventually arriving at a sort of “fuck everything” ethos. This “War Zone” is urban genocide on a grand scale, with a sociopath/serial killing machine (faded skull replacing the goalie mask) leading the crimson tempest -- all to a messy nu-metal beat.

Comparing Thomas Jane’s Punisher to Ray Stevenson’s Punisher is sort of like comparing a handgun to a fully armed tank. Stevenson is mother-fucking badass to the umpteenth power. Where I felt sympathy for Jane’s turn, and rooted for him to weed out the bad guys, my feelings towards Stevenson’s version of the titular character were much more primal and dark. Stevenson’s Punisher was a frightening and menacing character, one that walked that line between moral crusader and full-fledged psychopath. The righteousness of his cause was never in question, to him, but for the audience forced to endure a scene where he holds a little girl in his arms while firing a fist-sized hole through an unarmed and handcuffed man’s head, pushes those boundaries. There’s something to be said for a film that is willing to take those chances and push those boundaries beyond what is acceptable even for an exploitation film. For pretentious film critics, generally, celebration of such violence is irredeemable and something to be chastised, however, for real people – the kind that pay good money wanting to see the Punisher killing people, dead – Anderson’s vision is a boon.

Glimpsed in sporadic flashback, we learn that Special Forces Instructor Frank Castle, five years earlier, had a wife and a young daughter and that during a sunny afternoon jaunt to the park, it was all taken from him in a hellfire of bullets. Apparently the Castle clan were front and centre for a contract hit on a local area mobster, then they suddenly became the contract hit. What’s the old saying, ‘no witnesses?’ Yeah, anyways, arising from the ashes of that day -- not Frank Castle, but the Punisher -- the doting, loving father replaced by a highly trained, highly focused, militarized vigilante-killing machine. Half a decade past and he has wiped out almost every major mob family in the city, as well as thousands of low-level street thugs. Nobody cares, not even the local police who have become willing accomplices in his parade of death. By subverting the urban guns-for-cash amnesty programs established in several major cities, Castle’s only friend and major abettor, Micro (Wayne Knight), has tapped into the heightened comic absurdity of the ‘off-the-grid’ reality of his friend’s unconventional sewer-dwelling lifestyle. Under his reprieve program Castle uses the same guns and bullets turned in by the street-slime to, in turn, kill said street-slime.

As with any film, there must be something to propel it forward and, in this case, it is Frank’s sudden moral lucidity following the accidental killing of an undercover police officer at his hand during an extended opening massacre in a bottle-factory fronting for a mafia hangout. There’s something to Castle’s dilemma that rings false, even from the start, as his whole life seems designed to foster his unremitting battle strategy and it’s simply not palatable to suggest that he would abandon that under any circumstance. When he garners a fondness for the slain officer’s widow (Julie Benz) and young daughter (Stephanie Janusauskas), Stevenson, the actor, is forced to tap into his veiled dramatic reserve to suggest that the fallen agent’s daughter reminds him deeply of his own lost kin. The scene where he exhibits his daughter’s belongings to the mystified little girl runs the gamut of sentiment; from strangely sombre to downright awkward, maybe even heartbreaking depending on how far you are willing to let yourself go with it.

"Who punishes you?” Benz’s character angrily says to Frank as his congenial gesture of money comes off as strangely callous given that he has just murdered her husband. Castle observes Agent Donatelli's widow in a mirrored way, as his own situation but inverted. In her mind though, Castle, the Punisher, not some nameless, faceless mobsters, is to blame. The light that he gives Donatelli's daughter speaks to a greater biblical symbolism at work here. Castle not only sees himself as judge, jury and executioner, but as a punisher, suggesting that God is inefficient and extraneous to this contemporary reality. A scene where he enters a church, on the surface, plays into the fancy that Castle is seeking guidance or salvation, until we realize that it’s a meeting place to lay out yet another battle strategy, nothing more. He even suggests to a hovering Priest, someone he knew in his old life, that he’d like to get his hands on God. “I am the light,” he seems to be saying in no uncertain terms to Donatelli's daughter. Later, in a hilarious final act, a moment occurs where the reality of the piece comes crashing down like a hammer on a glass table; as the Punisher steps in for the vacant prison warden known as God, as a sign reading “Jesus Saves” slowly burns out, becoming simply “Saves” – with the Punisher, gun drawn, standing curiously beside it.

As much as I enjoyed this film, I’m not about to suggest it isn’t problematic because it is. There is a certain unevenness to it all, as two very different filmic tones seem to emerge through the haze, both of which work in their own way, but probably shouldn’t have existed in the same film. Ray Stevenson’s Punisher-thread is simplistic, dark, and unrelentingly gruesome in tone – a "Death Wish" Mack Bolan-esque revenge scenario playing out with deadly serious intent. The comedy is black and the laughs arrive only out of unease. On the other side, there’s the story of Jigsaw and Looney Bin Jim. This tone is one of pure camp. In the opening bottle factory massacre, Castle tossed an up and coming gangster named Billy Russoti (Dominic West, absolutely chewing the fucking scenery here) into a glass crusher. Somehow he survived, but his face was so mangled that even after extensive surgery, he looked like a badly stitched together piece of meat – the kiss of death for the vain pretty boy. Lacking any type of quip to push the name-change, Russoti announces, “Call me Jigsaw”. Uh, okay. Anyways, Russoti, I mean, Jigsaw, wants his money back -- money that he thinks that he’ll find at the Donatelli residence. He also wants to kill the Punisher, but, really, he just wants his money. Hoping to provide support for his plan, he breaks his sadistically insane brother, Looney Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison), out of a local mental institution. Jim is only too happy to assist but not before he’s dined on the good doctor’s spleen. Ah, yes, cannibalism. With the widow and daughter kidnapped by the brothers, The Punisher is back on the case and he's pissed -- the two strands slamming into each other in a vicious, extremely violent showdown in a rundown hotel as The Punisher runs up against an endless stream of gangbangers and guns for hire, recruited by the brothers in a laughably silly"Patton"-like scene. As two separate films, one a straight ahead “Man on Fire” revenge movie and the other a campy-violent “Natural Born Killers” piece, they probably would have come off as near perfect, however, by merging the two strands into the same cinematic undertaking, something gets crossed up – and it fails to work. Yeah, they both bang the drums of excess but it doesn’t work. Such tonal differences often characterized those grindhouse features of the past, where the direction was so off the mark, or sloppy, that comedy and dark drama often unintentionally merged in the same vehicle. Here, the scenes where Jigsaw, Looney Bin Jim and The Punisher fill the same frame, it's a train wreck.

By excising the two brother’s and their story, and by pushing the heightened veracity and darkness of Ray Stevenson’s revenge story, it would have been a much better film. Mowing down acrobatic meth addicts, pimped-out mafioso and scores of ethnically diverse drug-addicted gangbangers, is just more fun than I can even describe -- and that's the direction the film should have focused on, not campy villians. The scene where he punches a hole into the head of a small time gangster and literally blows another up with a rocket, is orgasmic. Taking the cake is the earlier shooting of the handcuffed bloke. I know that it got the biggest cheer of all of the killings, at least in the theatre that I saw it in -- and this speaks to what the audience is and was craving. Personally, that is the kind of relentless take-no-prisoners grindhouse violence that I wanted. How surprised was I when it actually delivered. Anderson, a woman, deserves nothing but credit for making one of the few real "guy movies".

Regarding the performances, Ray Stevenson is badass personified. Very little dialogue but goddamn, he’s a mean-looking SOB. Dominic West overdoes it, doling out barbs in something that sounds hilariously like a New Yawk accent. Doug Hutchinson is at his over-caffeinated kinetic best here, not really acting as much as he’s just tapping into his animal self. This is light years away from his work in "The Green Mile". Julie Benz, a girl who keeps turning up in excessively violent flicks like “Saw V” and “Rambo” and the television series “Dexter”, is fast becoming a favourite of mine. I loves me some Julie Benz, fo sho. There’s others, namely a pair of laughable cops (Colin Salmon and Anderson regular Dash Mihok) but they are just window-dressing. The most important thing about this film is the nasty, brutal, realistic-looking violence. I loved this film because it dared to take it farther than any contemporary film before it besides maybe “Rambo” and in these politically correct 'let's cover the statue' times, that’s a triumph! If you can’t celebrate it in the movies, then when can you? Go see this!