The universe has been conspiring to have me watch this movie lately: after discovering that it existed, I found out that a filmmaker I follow on Twitter, Lexi Alexander, directed it, and then someone on a private, comics-focused group I'm part of on Facebook started talking about it. I went and found the episode of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast that has Alexander talking about the making of the movie. So, inspired by this I went to my Amazon Fire TV last night intending to rent it.
Result? It turns out it's been on Netflix the entire time.
So I watched it, and I can say that it's probably the best adaptation of the Punisher that's out there, including Netflix's own collaboration with Marvel, starring Jon Bernthal.
Of course, let's get one thing out of the way straight off: this isn't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place buried on the SyFy channel's lineup of direct-to-video movies, even though it has a pretty good cast (including Dominic West, the Wire's own Jimmy McNulty, as the main villain Jigsaw).
But, its charm comes from a certain unhinged, go-for-broke willingness to plumb the depths of the source material's absurdity. Not content to set up a trio of parkour-loving criminals to get killed by the Punisher, it dispatches one of them, mid-flip, with a rocket-propelled grenade.
When the Punisher blows a gangster's head off in front of the FBI agent who's been chasing him all movie, the agent's reaction is less horror as annoyance.
And in the climactic battle, where the Punisher faces off against most of New York's street gangs, one bad guy's last words are, "Oh, for fuck's sake." To put it another way, this movie has Garth Ennis's fingerprints all over it, and to be honest, that's exactly how it should be.
In case you don't know, Garth Ennis is the Northern Irish writer of comics like Preacher, Hitman, the Demon and the Marvel Max Nick Fury mini-series that apparently put off George Clooney because of how ridiculously violent it was. He also had a couple of defining runs on the Punisher, beginning with a 12-issue limited series in 2000 and going through a regular series on the mature-readers Marvel Max imprint.
I caught the 2000 series when it came out, but didn't read any of the Max series until a couple of years ago, when a friend lent me the "Kitchen Irish" storyline. You could say that Ennis and the Punisher were made for each other - if you take the premise of a guy killing every violent criminal he sees at face value, it'd get boring, so you need to add something extra, a little colorful, maybe a little grotesque. And this is exactly what Ennis specializes in.
War Zone dispenses with the Punisher's origin story almost completely. It mentions it from time to time in order to give viewers just as much information as they need, but otherwise the Punisher is a known presence in New York, with both the cops and the mob well aware of him. It does give Jigsaw's origin story, by having the Punisher throw him into a glass-grinding machine.
Even when story elements don't come from Garth Ennis, they feel like they could: one of Jigsaw's henchmen is his brother Loony Bin Jim (played by Doug Hutchison), who in his first scene eats the insane asylum orderly who's been torturing him for years. Once free he smashes every mirror he sees for the rest of the movie, out of respect to Jigsaw and (presumably) because he really likes smashing things.
In case it's not obvious, this movie is kind of like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, but with all the gore and violence retained. People are dispatched with guns, knives, spiked railings, baseball bats and a chair leg, among other things. The Punisher himself, played here by Ray Stephenson, is kind of a cypher, stoically wading through hundreds of bad guys and not uttering a line until about 20 minutes into the movie. His Terminator-like crusade positions him as the straight man against the incompetent and morally compromised cops and FBI agents who first are assigned to catch him but end up teaming with him.
Put another way, this is a spiritual precursor to Deadpool, though more grounded in reality because the Punisher doesn't have superpowers. And if it looks a little cheaper, at least it all looks and feels appropriate - and anyway, it's clear the filmmakers blew all their budget on the gore effects.
So, silly and absurd and violent as it is, I can't do anything other than recommend you check it out ASAP, while it's still on Netflix. Forget the po-faced discussions of PTSD and gun control that dominate the Jon Bernthal show: this is the Punisher as it's meant to be.
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