Release Date: Dec. 5
Director: Lexi Alexander
Writers: Nick Santora and Art Marcum & Matt Halloway
Cinematographer: Steve Gainer
Starring: Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Julie Benz, Wayne Knight, Colin Salmon
Studio/Run Time: Lionsgate, 107 mins.
The main villain for Punisher:
War Zone is nicknamed “Jigsaw” due to his face’s new appearance following
an encounter with Frank Castle, aka The Punisher.His face is composed of a bunch of ugly
strips of skin thrown together to create an even more hideous whole.It’s a particularly apt metaphor for the
movie as well. Not only is Jigsaw's mangled exterior almost exactly the same as the origin for Batman’s
Twoface, it’s also indicative of how the film itself is composed from many of
the lousier parts of every movie War Zone wishes
it could be.It’s a jigsaw puzzle, except
none of the pieces fit together.To be just a little more blunt, the film is one long series of other movies’ clichés piled onto each other, one
after the next.
Nominally a sequel to the 2004 film The Punisher, the film picks up where the last one left off by
featuring a completely new cast, crew and, for the most part, continuity.Castle is now living in an underground,
Batman-style base in the sewers and is being hunted equally by the police and
criminals.If this sounds familiar to
you, it means you weren’t living under a rock this past summer.He pops up occasionally to kill off entire
mob families with impunity, eventually botching a job against Jigsaw and
forcing a showdown between the two.
But plot isn’t really why anyone comes to a movie like this;
it’s the action.If the comic-book side
of the film is mostly a bad Batman knock-off, then the action sequences are a
series of wannabe-John-Woo-setpieces.But director Lexi Alexander isn’t Woo (and even Woo’s not doing so great
these days), so the gunfights are mostly a series of two-shots with Castle firing
randomly in some direction, followed by a cut to that person being hit by a bullet.To make things interesting, the deaths are
absurdly bloody to the point where it’s a borderline slasher film, but since
these are within action sequences, the camera never focuses on them for more
than a couple of frames.
And really that’s the film’s problem: It’s a little bit of
everything, all done badly.It’s a bad
procedural, a bad superhero movie, a bad shooter movie, a bad slasher
movie.Add to this an almost complete
lack of characterization, believable plot or realistic dialogue and you have
one of the few non-direct-to-DVD films being produced these days that is
laughably awful.