Punisher: War Zone (2008)

Director: Lexi Alexander

Starring: Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Wayne Knight

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: Vengeance has a name.

Plot: After hunting down and killing hundreds of violent criminals, Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, faces his most deadly foe yet: Jigsaw.

My Rating: 6/10

Would I watch it again? It wouldn't kill me.

My man glands were salivating from the word-of-mouth this was getting in the geek community. The stage was set to have my ass handed to me. Sadly, I still had said ass nearly two hours later. Sigh.


First off, Stevenson as Frank Castle/The Punisher was a BAD.FUCKING.ASS! He's the best part of the film. Hands down. West is over-the-top as his enemy, Jigsaw (the poster child for Italian mobster stereotypes), which would work if it were more of a light-hearted movie. That's the whole problem. P:WZ doesn't know what it wants to be. If they played it as a serious action crime thriller all the way through I'd be dancing a jig, Riverdance-style, right now. Stevenson was too pitch-perfect and menacing to have his bad guy rival act like he's channeling Beetlejuice or Jack Nicholson's Joker. Jigsaw and his gang are simply too silly. Great makeup, though.


Hey, wait a second. I laughed pretty heartily at some of that silliness, but it didn't work with the movie. At some point I just said, "fuck it", and lowered my expectations for the duration of the film. The Punisher did have some great lines and some amazing kills, though.

"This is only the beginning."

Carlos: [dying after having been axed by Loony Bin Jim] See you in hell, Frank.
Frank Castle: If I see you anywhere near Hell, I'll kick your ass out.
[Frank covers Carlos's eyes and shoots him to end his suffering]


This is bloody as hell and, at times, is loads of fun and the demise of Jigsaw is COOL.AS.HELL. If it weren't so damned silly and comic-booky I would have liked it better. It just kills me to no end how Hollywood will take a potentially lucrative franchise and fuck the living shit out of it, thereby killing it before it has a chance to live. Why couldn't they have fucked up a franchise that deserved to be delivered D.O.A. like, oh I don't know...TOMB RAIDER?