THE CRITIC-AL LIST
5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH

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2012
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And The Half-Blood Prince
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Punisher:War Zone
The Uninvited
Amusement
The Good The Bad And
The Weird
Hush
Underworld
The RIse OF The Lycans
My Bloody Valentine
Bolt
Slumdog Millionaire

Directed by Lexi Alexander. Starring Ray Stevenson, Dominic West and Doug Hutchison. Action, Canada/Germany/USA, 103 min. Web Site

Are they going to keep on making THE PUNISHER until the Hollywood-powers-that-be decides they’ve got it right? Yet I’ve liked all the movies based on the Marvel comic about ex-marine Frank Castle waging a personal vendetta on faceless organized crime after they killed his family.

Mark Goldblatt’s 1989 version was fine despite Dolph Lundgren. Jonathan Hensleigh’s 2004 reboot was good because of Thomas Jane. Now the third attempt to make the vigilante hero a 'Marvel Knights' viable franchise might not be great, but it is great fun even though Ray Stevenson (OUTPOST) etches Castle more in robotic Terminator terms. Based on the harder-edged ‘Punisher Max’ series created by Garth Ennis in 2004, Castle is given a more straightforward origin flashback to explain why he’s waging a one-man war on the criminal underworld. Here Castle has set sights on ruthless Billy Russoti (Dominic West) after the Cosa Nostra mob boss caused him to kill an undercover FBI agent. Disfigured in a glass-grinding machine Russoti is transformed into the patchwork Frankenstein-faced Jigsaw (no relation!) who kidnaps the deceased agent’s wife (Julie Benz) and daughter and holds them prisoners surrounded by an army of thugs culled from all the local street gangs with a Punisher axe to grind.  The plot is simplistic good versus evil pulp fiction; the dialogue is comically bad (“You’re a long way from the seminary, Frank”), the uber-graphic gore vicious and unrelenting. Yet director Lexi (GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS) Alexander brings independent movie flair to her neon-washed serving of violent escapism with an enormous body count, its swift-paced, brainless energy scoring high on the quality must-see trash level. Stevenson doesn’t really make much impression once past his nose self-surgery with a pencil, which is a hilarious highpoint.

The just-cast-in-Neil-Marshall’s-CENTURION West overcooks his shrill nastiness to delicious effect and Doug Hutchison has a ball playing his deranged psycho brother LBJ (Loony Bin Jim), the one character who doesn’t exist in the ‘Punisher Max’ series. You’ve got to take it with a huge pinch of salt, but PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is massively entertaining if you do.

Alan Jones

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