Back before Tim Burton’s Batman, superhero flicks were viewed as “B” movies at best. They were often filled with cheesy dialogue, over the top action, and cliched caricatures for characters. With modern comic movies, particularly the recent Watchmen, The Dark Knight, and Spiderman series, movie going comic fans have come to expect so much more. Comic films have come to be viewed as an artistic medium that can easily rival their source material.  With the release of Punisher: Warzone, Marvel seeks to capitalize on the success of the previous Punisher film (and hopefully erase people’s memories of the even older Dolph “I must break you” Lundgren version).

In the previous Punisher film, the origin of the Punisher, aka Frank Castle, was the main focus of the film.  In this new film, the Punisher is already established and his slightly different origin is told via flashback sequences while the majority of the movie focuses on his current war on crime. While raiding a mob facility, he inadvertently kills an undercover FBI agent who he mistakes for one of the bad guys. He also goes about murdering everything that moves within a mile radius and extremely disfigures one Billy the Beaut, who goes on to become the arch villain known as Jigsaw due to his patchy reconstruction of a face.  The rest of the movie follows the Punisher as he attempts to stop Jigsaw as he seeks out the widow of the undercover FBI agent, whom he believes knows the location of a briefcase full of money entrusted to her late husband. That’s pretty much the plot of the film.

The rest of the movie is filled with numerous shooting deaths, some impalement’s, some stabbing deaths, some explosions, and some more shootings. There are a few deaths that really just catch your attention, but by the end of the film, they all seem a bit repetitive. The film definitely has some serious cheese factor to it.  While the previous film tried to explore Castle’s character and what makes him the way he is, this film simply shows him killing the hell out of anything in his way. I thought I would never get tired of seeing heads explode via headshots, and I still am not tired of it, but this film features more headshots than a Kobe Tai movie marathon. I still enjoy deaths via bullet to the dome, but it seemed a bit overdone in this movie.  As cool as some of the deaths are, they all just seem a bit too over the top. There is some attempt at showing Castle’s emotional side, however it really seems to disrupt the flow of the movie and just seems out of place rather than integrated to what is going on.

Ray Stevenson is a decent Punisher. Physically, he is more like the Punisher than Thomas Jane’s version, however he lacks the humanity that Jane brought to the role. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but some additional depth would definitely have helped strengthen the character. On the flip side, the villains in this film- Jigsaw (Dominic West) and Looney Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison) are so wacky and inept they seem almost better suited as Disney villains, if not for their occasional brutal tendencies. One scene in particular towards the film’s end comes to mind that features the two villains in a shoot out with a detective and an FBI agent. The shootout ends because the villains run out of bullets and are forced to be placed under arrest. Here are the two most sociopathic homicidal maniacs in the entire film and they run out of ammo and surrender to two bumbling law enforcement officers. This scene pretty much summed up everything that was wrong with these two characters for me.

The movie isn’t a bad film, but it just has a straight to video quality reminiscent of early 80s comic films (think video game movies now).  Much of the production value from the previous film has been scaled back, and it definitely shows. To be fair, there are some pretty entertaining death scenes and Stevenson’s Punisher, for the most part, comes across as a genuine bad ass. There are just too many inconsistencies that sabotage things once they start getting too good.  If you can get past all the corniness, Punisher:Warzone is a decent action flick. If you are looking for anything more than that, you’d probably best be served watching the Thomas Jane version or another comic flick altogether.