Punisher: War Zone is the brainchild of director Lexi Alexander, a German born martial arts and kickboxing international champion (female, so its more like a hobby than a sport). Coupling her expertise in hand to hand combat, anger riddled ancestry, and another sexist statement my editor has forced me to censor, it is of no great surprise that Punisher: War Zone is what this critic considers to be the pièce de résistance of modern action thrillers. Equipped with only a keen intellect and a bottle of Wild Turkey, it became clear to me that Alexander is to cinema what Mozart was to music. Mozart’s early work followed the tempi pattern of quick-slow-quick in a three movement form and so in echoing this past master of entertainment we see the manifestation of this style in Alexander’s epic odyssey of violence.
Movement I: Opening Allegro
The Punisher interrupts a mob boss’s dinner party by decapitating the crippled aging mob boss in his wheelchair with a f*cking buck knife, snaps his wife’s neck twice, breaks a mans arm and impales him in the chest with the broken bone, and then proceeds to kill roughly 20 people all by unconventional means of badassery. Cut to the Punisher throwing the main antagonist ‘Jigsaw’ into a glass-recycling machine where his face is ripped off.
Movement II: Slow
The Punisher learns in the preceding melee he has killed an undercover agent survived by a wife and child. Stripped of a family himself, we see the human side of the Punisher who battles with guilt and at this point his introspection gives way to me leaving to urinate because, really, who gives a shit?
Movement III: Closing Allegro
Jigsaw kidnaps a bunch of people close to the Punisher and raises a small army to combat him like the f*cking douche nozzle he is. Understandably the Punisher flips his shit and kills everybody, including Jigsaw, who is impaled with a bar and thrown onto an open flame where his face starts to melt off. At which point the punisher states, “This is just the beginning.” Now I’m hammered at this point. My initial goal was to take a shot for every fight scene, but by number eight I had to come to terms with the fact that I was indeed drinking by myself on a Tuesday night. Only now that I have sobered up do I realize the spectacular allusion the punisher has made to Jigsaw going to burn for an eternity in hell.
Deaths of honorable mention:
- Villain who has the leg of a chair inserted into his frontal lobe via the eye socket.
- Villain who has the Punishers fist inserted into his frontal lobe via the eye socket.
- Villain who has both kneecaps shot, tossed from small building onto spike, and finally done in when Punisher jumps off said building using villains neck to decreased rate of decent for safer landing.
- Grandma with face missing
To leave you, my esteemed reader with a final thought, The Punisher: War Zone, is more than just a blood soaked journey of fervent vigilantism. It is a tale of a man with a moral compass that leads him astray from the path that humanity deems 'normal,' but only in order to protect that very path from the tyrannical tendencies of man. Beyond this simple message of the extraordinary value of a man who is able to shed his skin of indifference, there is one more. This other moral can be found in the last line of the movie that is, “Oh God, now I’ve got brain splattered all over me!” which roughly translates to, “YOU DON’T F*CK WITH THE PUNISHER!” Fin.
