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War Zone is, I guess, a sequel to the 2004 movie starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta. That one was a sweet little revenge thriller with more brains that one could hope for. It isn’t the best comic book adaptation but it was better than it’s predecessor starring Dolph Lundgren made 15 years earlier. Before you whip out your calculator, that was 1989. There, saved you the trouble. This movie is called more of a reboot which is stupid, the 2004 Punisher was also a reboot. Are they gonna reboot this “franchise” with every release?
Well enough with the terminology-picketing. All 3 Punisher movies have nothing to do with eachother. Sure, they consist of a man in Black called Frank Castle killing mobsters but other than that they all have different casts and even different death scenes of the Punishers family. Punisher: War Zone is the movie that is closest to the feel of the comic book. They paid a lot of attention to the visual style of the movie which is good. For a dark and grim movie there is a lot of color in the film. Sadly, this made me think of the Joel Schumacher Batman films though there was no neon used here. It’s explainable they use a lot of coloring in the night scenes as 95% in the movie consists of them. Our Frankie doesn’t see much daylight.
Not only graphically does this movie stay true to the comic, the action is as comical as can be. There is tons of bloodshedding and as graphic as can be. For the first time there’s also a genuine Punisher bad guy with a gimmick in the movie; Jigsaw. A man with a by glass molested and cut up face. Nasty. Now we have our over the top gratious violence, comic book feel, and nicely shot visuals, what could go wrong?
Well the entire scripts fit on a piece of toiletpaper. You would the even have enough space to use the paper without smudging the script you have just written. Seriously, the whole movie consists of nothing more than The Punisher shooting up mobsters, accidentally killing an undercover cop, creating Jigsaw, and having a war with Jigsaw. This movie feels so shallow. It doens’t help that Ray Stevenson as The Punisher gets almost no lines. Most of the time he’s killing people and looking angry. Hell, he might even have less centences than Arnold had in The Terminator. I just didn’t like this Punisher. Same goes for the bad guy. Dominic West as Jigsaw reminded me of a Dick Tracy bad guy. Come to think of it, the earlier mentioned color in the movie: it reminds me of how the Dick Tracy movie looked…
You know you’re watching a not-so-good Punisher movie when it reminds you of Dick Tracy.
