Punisher: War Zone

After Delgo, I had to hang around Leominster for a showing of another movie that was sprinting out of theaters: Punisher: War Zone. As in the case of Transporter 3, I had not seen any of the previous movies in the series, so forgive me I speak out of ignorance. Moreover, I am not familiar with the comic book series upon which it is based.

In the opening of the movie, we see a ruthless organized crime family---Italian-Americans in New York City. These are really bad guys. The whole family is evil. They don't even treat each other very nicely. Yawn.

Then the hero arrives. Without a word or howdy-maam, he proceeds to ruthlessly butcher the entire family. Hurray! The police arrive, but they let him slip away on purpose.

By this time I'm wondering if I can even stay in the god-damn theater to finish watching this crap.

"Great," I said, "another movie about psychopathic mass murderer portrayed as a hero dispensing justice."

But then the movie did something absolutely startling: it labeled the "hero" as a mass-murderer. The police are actually after him (well, at least officially). The mass-murdering-hero expresses remorse over killing someone and tries to make amends. But his actions eventually lead to chaos, and the deaths of people close to him.

The uncanny similarity of this story to The Dark Knight is impossible to ignore, right down to the disfigured villain, who in this case is called "Jigsaw" instead of "The Joker." But I couldn't help having the following heretical thought: I liked this movie more than the Batman flick of last summer.

Certainly The Dark Knight is more complex and artistically daring, but in its simplicity, Punisher: War Zone actually presents a coherent theme that avoids some of the fatal logical inconsistencies of TDK. I enjoyed it more as a story, especially considering it flies by, at about an hour and half.

But by the end of the movie, something had begun to bother me very deeply about this movie, as well as The Dark Knight and many other recent films of this type. It was something I couldn't put my figure on until now, but thanks to the lucidity of this very violent and bloody film, I was finally able to see it.

I will have to write about it in a following post, but I guess I could state it for now as this: The War Zone Does Not Exist.