![]() Though the Punisher is the character the audience is meant to be rooting for, his status as a “hero” is only distinguished by the fact that his enemies are worse.ĭominic West and Doug Hutchison, as the villainous brothers Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim, are even more outrageous. Alexander’s exaggerated approach is the opposite of the kind of fetishistic embrace that’s made Castle an uneasy staple (his signature skull cropped up all over during the Iraq War). It’s big, it’s bold, it’s colorful and it’s ecstatic when fully unleashed. ![]() It’s closer to Tim Burton’s Batman films than the other comic book movies of the time, which were striving for a measure of verisimilitude. The first big action set-piece - in which Castle (Ray Stevenson) crashes a mob boss’ dinner party with all the melodramatics of Batman, immediately decapitates a man, then hangs upside down from a chandelier while firing guns with both hands - makes clear that War Zone is an out-and-out comic book movie while wielding a bombastic sense of violence. Super powers may be nonexistent in the world of the Punisher, but the way the film is shot - and how exaggerated the characters become - comes close to rendering that power cap irrelevant. The movie revels in cartoon bloodshed, placing it apart from contemporaries such as Iron Man and The Dark Knight, which preceded War Zone by only a few months, as well as the more realist bent of the recent Netflix Punisher series.ĭirected by Lexi Alexander, who lifts some of the film’s sequences directly from the comic books, War Zone buzzes with neon lights and outlandish action sequences (and the accordingly splatter-y kills). War Zone, dropped in an odd December 2008 release window, comes off as a fish out of water in that regard. The result is a show that’s grim in a way that, while not necessarily antithetical to the Punisher’s ethos, feels half-baked and ill-suited as a series about an unstoppable vigilante with a seemingly unending supply of guns in the current climate. Jon Bernthal’s spin on things in Netflix’s recent Marvel series fits into much the same kind of category, subscribing to the hyper-seriousness that tends to denote “prestige” TV. Both are perfect distillations of action movie tropes of their respective decades, and reflections of how violence has been portrayed in the media. The two Punisher films leading up to War Zone - released in 19, starring Dolph Lundgren and Thomas Jane, respectively - speak a little to the reason that Frank Castle continues to have cultural capital. His firearm-heavy particulars (as well as all the extralegal murder and torture) make the character inherently difficult to tackle, more so as the national conversation around gun control grows more relevant. In broad strokes, the Punisher’s origin story is a familiar one: After his family is murdered by mobsters, Frank Castle embarks on a quest for vengeance. It’s also more fun - a feat in and of itself. It’s a superhero film that’s ahead of its time - the kind of film that feels like a reaction to the past decade of Marvel and DC films, rather than a precursor. Of all the iterations of the Punisher that have come and gone, be they film or TV, live-action or animated, Punisher: War Zone stands out.
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