Punisher war zone movie#
It’s not completely without redeeming values, namely a committed performance by Jane and a memorably intricate fistfight, but it’s a needlessly miserable, mean-spirited movie with little to say beyond “watching his whole family get gunned down sure would make a guy mad.” Director Jonathan Hensleigh crafted a display of pointless contempt for humanity, including its own audience. I have to imagine the piss-poor quality of that 2004 Punisher film hurt ticket sales as well. The four years that passed between 2004’s The Punisher and 2008’s Punisher: War Zone was a remarkably short time to restart the clock on the character’s cinematic continuity, even if the latter might work as a sequel to the former if you squint a little.
And while Batman Begins successfully rebooted The Dark Knight’s film franchise in 2005, and the James Bond film Casino Royale solidified the concept of a franchise reboot as a viable Hollywood strategy the following year, it was still a rather novel idea by 2008. But feature films almost always enjoy more visibility in the eyes of the mainstream, and the fact remains that by the time Punisher: War Zone was released in 2008, Stevenson was the third Punisher actor in as many films, none of which are in the same continuity. Of course, The Punisher predates all these films, created in 1974 by Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., and Ross Andru within the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man. Thomas Jane starred in 2004’s The Punisher just four years earlier in a film that was itself a reboot, as the first live-action take on the Marvel antihero was a 1989 film of the same name starring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Mostly, I have to assume audiences just didn’t know what to make of it. The blame for PWZ‘s commercial failure does not lay solely at the feet of critics. That’s a shockingly poor showing for a film bearing the Marvel brand, and it remains the lowest-grossing Marvel-produced film in history. It was a veritable box office bomb, grossing just $10.1 million on a $35 million budget, and opening at just #8 – EIGHT! – at the box office. I’ll get to the poor reviews in a moment, but first we have to acknowledge that, outside of critics, few people saw Punisher: War Zone in theaters in the first place.
I sincerely don’t understand why this entertaining and well-crafted action romp received as much hate at the time of its release as it did. I have a different relationship with 2008’s Punisher: War Zone, starring Ray Stevenson and directed by Lexi Alexander from a script by Nick Santora, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway. In others, they’re films I like a great deal, but understand where the displeasure towards them comes from. In some cases, they’re deeply flawed efforts in which I find redeeming qualities anyway. Silber Linings has been going about six months, and in that half-a-year I’ve made several attempts to rehabilitate the reputations of misunderstood or outright reviled genre films. Each week in Silber Linings, he takes a humorous look at the weirdest, funniest, and most obscure bits of comics and pop culture that he can’t get out of his head. The Beat’s Gregory Paul Silber has been accused of having a bit of an… obsessive personality.
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