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.
