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Any other film, this would be a liability. War Zone, though, has the good fortune to be a movie about the Punisher, the most thuggish and antiheroic of Marvel's comic-book stars. Marvel's tried to tried to make a workable movie out of this twice before with dismal results, but the third time, at last, is the bloody charm. While War Zone is hardly a good movie in the classic sense, it is finally the film deserved by the character.
By that, I mean that it's of a piece with the character. Frank Castle, the man who would be the Punisher, has nothing in the way of special powers or abilities. He is not a traditional superhero; he is defined only by his extraordinary proficiency with weaponry and his single-minded desire to rid the world of criminal scum. War Zone, directed with unfussy proficiency by Lexi Alexander, displays a similar purity of focus that seems an extension of its protagonist's quasi-Manichean worldview. To the extent that there is a story line, it goes like this: There are some bad guys, led by grotesquely scarred Mafia psycho Jigsaw (Dominic West, enjoying a chance to chew some scenery). They do some bad stuff, including dealing arms to Eastern European terrorists and invading the home of a woman (Julie Benz) whose husband was an undercover cop in Jigsaw's organization and was accidentally killed by the Punisher, but none of that truly matters - it's their very existence as bad guys that brings them into conflict with the fatal justice of the grim-faced Punisher (Ray Stevenson).
With something this basic, the viewer becomes a conspirator in the cinematic apparatus - its disinterest in anything superfluous to its aim of providing violent, primally satisfying entertainment is so naked that it becomes a comment on the mechanics of sensation, and those who watch are confronted with the choice between rejecting the work for the number of things it has no intention of doing or recognizing the artificiality of the work and agreeing to meet it on its level. This is essentially a highfalutin' way to say that Alexander makes it obvious from the first scene that War Zone is proud to be a no more than a pulpy bare-bones B-movie, giving no quarter to those who would rather it become something else.
If you're one of those people, there won't be much for you here. I admit to a weakness for pulpy B-movies, and thus I was incredulously hooked from the moment the film opened on a meeting between West and a bunch of Mafia bigwigs so ridiculously caricatured that the cliche deconstructed itself. There's no irony in War Zone, no indication that anyone involved considered themselves above the material, yet there is a sort of awareness of and indulgence of its own gory hyperbolic ridiculousness. West's grandstanding performance is key; he shows that he knows just how far over the top he can go without undermining the film (a la Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau), and he always appears to be having the time of his life. He's matched in Grand Guignol intensity by Doug Hutchinson as his psychotic brother Loony Bin Jim, who upon introduction into the story proceeds to mutilate a hospital orderly and devour his kidneys. It's that kind of movie.
The freewheeling insanity of the film's villains needed a grounding force on the other side of the seesaw, which is where Stevenson's man of marble comes in. Frank Castle as written here is less a man than a bloodthirsty force of nature, Old Testament vengeance in a pair of army boots. Unlike Jonathan Hensleigh's 2004 take on this character, where Thomas Jane spent most of the film drinking Wild Turkey, moping and getting the crap kicked out of him, the makers of War Zone give us a hardass who at rare intervals lets the facade crack and the underlying pain seep through, and Stevenson proves to be the man for the job. Said underlying pain has to do with the death of Castle's family at the hands of the Mafia after inadvertently witnessing a hit; this is what in Hollywood they call "motivation."
Anyone who's watched enough action films knows that "motivation" is code for "flimsy excuse to justify voluminous amount of horrific violence." War Zone spends roughly ten to fifteen minutes of its 103 minutes of this motivation, mostly in scenes between Stevenson, Benz and Benz's adorable moppet of a daughter. The rest is blood, thunder and muzzle flashes, and while Alexander isn't breaking new ground, her tight, energetic direction keeps the film's pulse at an acceptably breakneck pace. Her compositions emphasize shadow and darkness, yet she gets enough coverage to construct legible action scenes with a minimum of light. Furthermore, the film's cutting construes quickness without sacrificing spatial coherence. Take that, Marc Forster.
At bottom, War Zone's main asset is its acknowledgment of its place in the world. It's antisocial downmarket dross that isn't trying to be anything other than antisocial downmarket dross, a haven for those in need of cheap thrills and quick grue fixes. It's familiar and ugly and you've definitely seen something like it before. But there's something to be said for honesty. War Zone is the kind of film where you can see the machinery churning under the surface at every point. That's not automatically a bad thing.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)