Man, I don't know if you remember "The Punisher," Jonathan Hensleigh's 2004 attempt to bring Marvel's stone-faced badass Ray Castle onto the big screen. I really hated that movie. I really, really did. There were so many things wrong with it, things that really shouldn't have been so hard to get right. Hensleigh took the origin story way over the top (boasting in a 2004 interview, "I invented a lot... I made it a lot worse"), based the plot on a subpar Garth Ennis storyline from the comics, turned the Punisher's brutality down to five rather than up to 11, and set the film in Florida for some unconscionable reason. It left a bad taste in every "Punisher" fan's mouth.
You'd think that would have been the end of it, but lo and behold, Lexi Alexander rolled out "Punisher: War Zone" last month, presenting it, "Hulk"-style, as a reboot, not a continuation, of Hensleigh's movie (itself a reboot of Mark Goldblatt's "The Punisher," from 1989). Alexander, a former teenage world champion in both kickboxing and karate, knows how to put violence on the screen. The no-nonsense British actor Ray Stevenson takes the Frank Castle role, which was a deft casting choice: Stevenson looks like the Punisher -- not the comics character, necessarily, but the idea you have of the guy. He walks like him, acts like him and talks like him (except for occasional moments when he talks like British actor Ray Stevenson).
Alexander's movie is definitely not Oscar-caliber by any standard, but we finally have a decent "Punisher" adaptation. I'll cop to having had low expectations beforehand, but I was pleasantly surprised by much of the movie -- particularly the "Frank Castle kills everything" aspect of it. Alexander takes the body count right over the top, where it belongs. The story was kind of undercooked, but the movie smartly starts off in medias res, with Frank Castle already a steely-eyed vigilante roaming the streets at night, and what follows is more about spectacle than sense.
Rather than try to doggedly follow a particular plotline from the comic, the movie tosses a bunch of familiar "Punisher" faces into the crockpot and lets them boil, which may have been the best approach. We get Dash Mihok as the bumbling detective Martin Soap, and Wayne Knight giving the performance of his life (really) as Castle's loyal ally Linus "Microchip" Lieberman. Dominic West, best known as charismatic fuckup Jimmy McNulty from HBO's "The Wire," is almost unrecognizable as the torn-up-and-stitched-together crime boss Jigsaw, and Julie Benz turns up as grieving widow Angela Donatelli.
Anyone who's even a little bit familar with the "Punisher" franchise knows to expect some insane stunts and gratuitous destruction, and Alexander is right there with us -- she seems to want to see it as much as we do. What this film lacks in dialogue and story -- and it lacks quite a bit -- is more than recouped in action. The Punisher is created when Frank Castle sees his family gunned down in Central Park; it was handled effectively, and stuck to the comics, which I appreciated. Later, Castle punches right through a guy's face, which is one of those things you don't realize you've been waiting your whole life to see until it actually happens.
Stevenson's Punisher doesn't say much, and in the rare moments when he does try and be human, he comes across as awkward and detached. This works unexpectedly well with the character, in my view -- he stopped being human when his family died, and what's left now is just a force of nature -- but I'm not sure if credit for this should go to Stevenson, since it could work as proof that he's either a very talented actor or a student of the School of Keanu. It was good to see Wayne Knight, though, and the inclusion of Micro was a nice nod to the Comic Book Guy types who would otherwise be asking where all the guns came from.
All in all, Alexander's movie does justice to the character, and I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel with Stevenson reprising his role. Any such sequel should keep the action in New York, like God intended, and retain some of the dark, antic humor that West's Jigsaw brought to the proceedings. What we have here is no "Dark Knight," but it is an entertaining bloodbath, and that's all a "Punisher" movie really needs to be.
