PUNISHER: WAR ZONE [R]
review by Howie Green

Okay, so when you go to see a movie called Punisher: War Zone, about Marvel Comics’ vengeance-bent character The Punisher, you know you’re not exactly in for a feel-good date movie. Frank Castle (Ray Stevenson) a.k.a. The Punisher is an all-out vigilante who, armed with an endless arsenal of guns and ammo, dishes up stacks of dead bodies and boatloads of violence, but, you know, it’s OK, because he’s one of the good guys. According to the Punisher’s back story, it’s OK that he kills or destroys everyone he doesn’t like because his wife and two small kids got killed by the mob after witnessing a mob hit and ever since then Mr. The Punisher has been on a rampage, a one-man army bent on personally killing every bad guy he can find.

This is the third movie featuring The Punisher, and unlike the previous two films that were comparatively light and airy, this one very closely follows the hellish look and feel and tone of the comic book. The film is dirty, grimy, dank, dark and filled with blood-soaked violence so extreme it make the old video game “Doom” look like a friendly game of Pong. The Punisher doesn’t just kill people — he blows their faces off, punches them right through their skulls and employs various other types of comic book violence in his never-ending search to kill all the bad guys. All the bad guys. Until they’re dead, dead, dead.

This installment is about The Punisher’s run-in with a gruesome villain called Jigsaw, né Billy Rissoti, until a Punisher-meted introduction to vat of broken, recycled glass made his face look like Harvey “Two-Face” Dent, only not as pretty. In the midst of his rampage to kill Rissoti and his gang, The Punisher kills an undercover Federal Agent and is racked with guilt, then taking it upon himself to watch over the agent’s wife and daughter because he knows the Jigsaw and his crazy brother will be coming after them to get revenge.

To put it mildly, the Terminator has nothing on The Punisher. Bullets fly, bodies explode, and blood flows, and of course, Mr. The Punisher saves the day and walks away into the night knowing that the dead agent’s wife and daughter are safe and the city can bury a couple hundred additional dead bad guys. Isn’t it romantic?

In the movie’s most surprising and revealing scene, The Punisher is in a church and confronted by an old friend from his long-gone seminary days. The priest warns The Punisher that his methods will not sit well with God, to which the Punisher replies, “Sometimes I’d like to get my hands on God!” This one scene goes a long way in letting us know that this guy is beholden unto no one, writing his own rules of behavior, the Golden Rule nowhere on the list.

With “Punisher: War Zone,” director Lexi Alexander (”Green Street Hooligans”) has fashioned an extreme, tough, dark movie that will no doubt please fans of The Punisher comic books, and given the questionable morality of everything he does, it makes one shudder at the thought of who might make up that peculiar demographic group (and what kind of access they have to heavy caliber weapons).•••

Howie Green is a regular contributor to the national network EDGE.