Bad Movie Tuesday: Punisher: War Zone

Roger Ebert described this film perfectly when he said “”Punisher: War Zone is one of the best-made bad movies I’ve seen.”

I won’t say this film is good. However, I will say that the final line is “Oh, great. Now I got brains on me.”

The first time I watched this film I turned it off. I just didn’t get it and disliked everything about it. However, my girlfriend and I took a trip this weekend and I downloaded a podcast called How Did This Get Made? The show is produced by Earwolf and features Paul Scheer (Piranha 3D), June Diane Raphael (Flight of the Conchords) and Jason Mantzoukas (The League).  This particular podcast featured Patton Oswalt and the director of Punisher: War Zone. The podcast chronicled the making of this film and why it tanked so badly at the box office.

I began to realize that I missed the point the first time around. I wasn’t celebrating the excessive violence…I was thinking it was twenty years too late. I decided to give it another shot at redemption. I was annoyed at myself for letting this violent, great looking B-movie treasure go through the cracks. It wasn’t totally my fault that I didn’t like it. I just needed to hear it from the director’s point of view. This is a film that somewhat works yet shouldn’t have worked.

The director Lexi Alexander is a world champion kick boxer who directed the solid Green Street Hooligans. She knew nothing about The Punisher yet the studio wanted her for the third adaptation because she was cheap and had some street cred for directing an Oscar nominated short film. The day she was supposed to sign on was the day the murders happened at Virginia Tech. As she was watching the news she noticed that in the killer’s dorm room he had a poster of the Punisher.

So, instead of directing a realistic version of the comic book she directed a bat sh*t crazy adaptation. The film features cartoonish violence so abundant you wonder how many more people will die (83 by the Punisher) This is not the Dolph Lundgren version where he rides motorcycles through the sewers or the Thomas Jane origin Punisher. This is a Punisher where the main character takes a back seat to violence and mayhem.

This is a “lets kill everybody quickly and violent” version. A version where a guy  fighting the Punisher is defending himself by using a chair…This chair is kicked and the leg goes into the henchman’s eye. There is also a scene where a guy is thrown into a glass crusher and instead of screaming in pain he screams “F**k you Castle! My face!”

This movie breaks the record for quickest decapitation …. The second kill occurs when the Punisher does a sweet somersault and slices off an old man’s head.  The bad guys are having a nice dinner party when the Punisher comes crashing in and violently kills all of them. When I say “violently” I mean Violence so brutal it becomes violence multiplied by seven. It is not the serious ultra-violence (Clockwork Orange) realistic violence (Saving Private Ryan) or torture violence (Saw).  It is violence turned up to 11. The things you see in this movie come straight out of the Punisher comic book (a fact I did not know).

A funny story was told on the podcast. The director included a meth addicted urban jumping gang in the film. The producers did not want to have these concrete jumpers because there were too many films using them (Live Free or Die Hard, Casino Royale). So, the director’s solution was to have the Punisher blow them up spectacularly with a grenade launcher. The victim was blown out of the air mid flip! I’ve never seen that before.

Punisher: War Zone was released in December and was absolutely pummelled by movie critics (Ebert loved it though). It also didn’t help that Punisher opened the same year as the Dark Knight and Iron Man. The problem is that they didn’t know all the kills were from the comic and the B-movie aesthetics  went over their heads. If you knew nothing about this film and watched it with a bunch of New York film critics you would dislike this movie. However, if you and your friends got together you would bask in the violent badness and dig the flick despite its flaws and incredible violence.

If you like bad guys getting shot out of the air by grenade launchers you will love this film. I’m paraphrasing the Punisher when I say “Good, bad, I’m the one who kills people by head snaps, elbow drops, bullets, knives and kicks.

You’ve been warned. Watch the movie and tell me what you think.