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Good afternoon or evening or whatever the hell! Today's column is about a dvd that came out last week, and I think I speak for all of us at this point when I say thank god for home video!
Sure, I know it's nice to see superhero movies in the theater -- how else would we know what our neighbors think of Patrick Wilson's butt if they don't shout it out loud, after all -- but for me, nothing quite beats enjoying these fantastical features in the comfort of your own home. Why, thanks to the contemporary internet, I don't need to encounter other people at all anymore! No more accusing eyes. I told you, mom, I told you.
Plus: you can slow a movie down and go back to things, and rewatch everything in short order, to ensure that you've fully grasped the many rich subtexts and nuanced themes at play, which I think is especially pertinent to
Punisher: War Zone, even though I haven't really found much of anything as of yet; I think I just need to watch it harder in the future.
But I do love the Punisher, yeah; he's a crucial part of my understanding of the morality of superhero comics. I still remember this one issue of
Spectacular Spider-Man (#143, Oct. ‘88) where he overcomes some mind control domination by a crappy villain in a silver and gold jumpsuit, and he shoots the guy to death. I'd never seen silly superhero costumes getting stained with a lot of blood before, since I was seven years old at the time, but what really knocked me out was that the Punisher just blew off Spider-Man when he started telling him how they should have gotten the crappy villain to testify against the Kingpin or something - this from a guy who hits people in the face all night and ties them up!
It was all very post-
Watchmen, very uncomfortable in its melding of ‘traditional' superhero stuff and hard-edged violence, but it did get my little mind racing on what comics could or could not do within the confines of certain genres; that was among my first-ever exposures to superhero comics too, so I've never really had a deep-seated notion of superheroes as successfully idealistic or innocent things, but only as forces struggling against self-awareness, of existing in a fantasy world with no assurance of justice and a great capacity for destruction. But maybe the Lee/Kirby/Ditko classics had a similar effect in their own day?
Of course, they didn't have the Punisher (or anyone) shooting a lot of people, and I did like to read about that, crappy kid that I was. God, why couldn't Spider-Man break someone's neck sometime? My friends and I would never dream of trying to find an issue of some Mature Readers superhero comic, of course; if it wasn't Marvel, it couldn't be any good, so we only wanted Marvel characters, specifically, to bend to our desires.
All of this is a very digressive means of getting around to the fact that I actually kinda-sorta enjoyed
Punisher: War Zone, mainly in that I appreciated its aesthetic. I've never seen director Leni Alexander's prior feature, Green Street Hooligans, although I've heard watching it is like being hit with something, and I do know she used to be heavily into martial arts (fighting and instruction) before she got into filmmaking, so it possibly makes sense that the film would all but pause and reflect on the species of impact: bullet strikes, fists going through people's faces, etc.
Seriously - while you're watching this thing, maybe with your sweetheart or your loved ones, pay attention to how often the Punisher doesn't so much as get into fights as walk into violence, sometimes merely striding onto the screen from the right and just
taking people apart. My heart kind of sank during one early bit where the Punisher swings around and shoots people in a circle, since I've never really associated the character or the concept with that kind of grace, but luckily it's only a momentary aberration, and eventually counterbalanced in a ludicrously short action scene in which Our Man encounters a group of freerunning goons and shoots one of them out of the air, mid-leap, with a rocket launcher. Finally, a Marvel movie with a thesis!
But while the movie does have a working sense of humor to go along with its rather attractively dingy production values, it doesn't have the type of rigorously lowdown plot that someone like Garth Ennis would have managed. Granted, it's unlikely that a movie could have captured the same effect as Ennis' work on
The Punisher MAX, which wound up drawing a lot of power from how its continuing story kept demonstrating the futility of the Punisher's efforts while acknowledging the thrill of his activities - that's the kind of thing serial fiction can excel at, and Ennis absolutely wrote these things as
serials. But even Ennis' & Steve Dillon's
Punisher: War Zone tie-in miniseries (scripted years before and related in title only) displayed a kind of energetically bloody comedy, tinged very slightly with sadness, which the movie doesn't entirely grasp.
Rather, and despite a few superficial Ennis references, the Alexander movie is more of a Chuck Dixon storyline writ large with tons of blood and gore. It's a new origin for Punisher foe Jigsaw -- the makeup sometimes seems ready to fall off of Dominic "McNulty from
The Wire" West's face, which I dug -- who decides to try and sell biological weapons to terrorists via the Russian mob, and meanwhile the Punisher is sad because he shot an undercover FBI guy, which unfortunately gives him too much license to mope around and pretend to quit like a band acting like they're going home before playing their encore, but then there's the dead guy's wife and little girl to save, so it's ok! Some of it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, I suspect, with scenes of Jigsaw standing in front of an American flag and urging a rainbow coalition of thugs to destroy the Punisher; I don't think Chuck Dixon would have done that.
Still, there's just too much predictable drama and half-baked attempts at quasi-redemption, climaxing in a ‘moral choice' showdown straight out of
The Dark Knight, albeit resolved in a bleaker, more Punisheresque manner. The acting is all over the place, with West launching himself way over the top and the fellow playing supporting villain Loony Bin Jim apparently attempting to channel Eric Freeman's
indelible performance in
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. Meanwhile, Ray Stevenson exhibits excellent physical presence as the Punisher, but occasionally appears to be struggling with his American accent, maybe resulting in his character not having all that many lines.
At least the action's got some force and personality behind it, though; I suspect it might stack up better taken in an ‘action movie' context than as a ‘superhero movie,' even though it still managed to remind me of the superhero stories that marked my introduction to the genre, if only in the form of the blunt impact that makes sense to a child. The curse of the post-
Watchmen kid, I suppose; was I supposed to get that effect out of those Spider-Man movies? I'm sure Sam Raimi would have liked to include a guy falling into a glass grinder, so I trust he's on my side of this.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
