Punisher: Warzone
I’ll preface this by saying that Ray Stevenson is a very good choice for The Punisher. From the grimace to the action, he portrayed the vigilante killer with a swagger that was missing from the original movie. Having seen him in HBO’s ROME, I was not expecting anything less of the big man and throughout this stinker I felt he was the only saving grace for the film. In stark contrast to Ray’s Frank Castle… we have the pretty boy turned psycho Billy Russoti / Jigsaw played by Dominic West. This bad guy started out annoying and ended up pathetic as his version of jigsaw bordered on a Jack Nicholson Joker type of lunacy accentuated by a line seemingly borrowed from the original Batman movie: “Billy is dead, you can call me Jigsaw”… or something along those lines. I had to roll my eyes at this.
So what do we get with The Punisher Warzone? Well we get cartoonishly gross stereotypes, like the Italian mafia and it’s boss with an accent so horrible it was laughable.You have an East Indian doctor who works on Jigsaw’s face, a black ex druggy, a latino gang banger, and of course a fat nerd that lives with his mom. They are all in here and I was annoyed to say the least, I wish they had tried even a little bit to make this thing compelling.
So let’s get to the story (WARNING SPOILERS).
Frank Castle lost his family to the Italian Mafia after witnessing an execution (yes they ignored the first movie completely). After seeing the gangsters dodge the justice system his anger led him to giving up his badge and taking the law into his own hands. This step in his life has brought scores of gangsters to silent meetings with his guns and removed many members from the organized crime rackets. In the Punisher Warzone, Frank has set his crosshairs on the narcisistic Billy Russoti, a “made man” and top earner for one of the crime families. In a shoot out with Billy, Frank accidentally kills an FBI undercover agent and sends Billy into a glass grinder that results in his face being turned into human hamburger. Unable to shake the guilt of killing a law enforcement agent, Frank tries unsuccessfully to square things mentally and with the deceased agent’s family. Jigsaw gets his face reconstructed by a private surgeon (in a scene that mirrored Tim Burton’s Batman a bit too much) and is brought back with the visage of a monster. Billy then decides to take on the name Jigsaw and breaks his lunatic brother out of the asylum (his brother eats people and quotes scientific facts)… whatever. Their main objective now is to find Frank Castle and take their revenge.
To get Castle, Jigsaw first kidnaps the dead agent’s wife and daughter, then he hires a black gang, an Asian gang and a white gang… (this is murder to write because it is so absurd). Then he takes over a multileveled office building, places the gang members on the different floors and takes the top penthouse for his haven as the Punisher of course must now climb his way to the top to rescue the pair from the bad guys. (WOW, are you kidding me? So it turns into a FPS Video Game with a boss at the top level.) This is bad enough but then the biggest plot hole in the movie itself is presented when Castle takes out the black gang, a Russian gang is brought in to kill Jigsaw but takes on the Asians and vanish afterwards… the white gang just mysteriously isn’t there in the gunfight either, (I was like Huh? Well maybe they will be on the DvD for the poor soul who purchases or rents this thing.) Anyway, the ending is no surprise, the dark good guy makes it to the top level, beats the big boss, rescues the wife and daughter, gets the high score plus forgiveness and puts his initials into the game. Nevermind that last sentence, video game joke. That’s the plot right there, add in about 30 guys getting killed by Castle and you have the movie.
Final Thoughts
I have seen other reviews where people say the violence was too much… who are these care bears? The violence was mediocre at best. If you saw Rambo this doesn’t hold a candle to it, but people do get shot up and get chairs shoved into their eye sockets… but nothing you haven’t seen before, if you saw the trailers you have seen the violence. So this is the Punisher… to be honest the only punishment besides seeing it is the pain of having to actually review it. Sorry but this is a step back for comic book movies, it just wasn’t that great. For all you folks who hated on the first movie, you know the one with John Travolta that had some sort of a plot. I bet you will like it even more after seeing this one.
Filed under Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller · Tagged with dominic west, frank castle, punisher, ray stevenson
