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Those mysterious folks known only as “they” say a lot of things.  For instance, they say that the third time is the charm, and oddly enough, that’s actually the case with Punisher: War Zone.  There was a LOT of reason to be afraid that this one would suck, in all honesty.  The original (and not the most recent one) was barely watchable, and the FIRST remake / reboot wasn’t much better.  Punisher: War Zone, meanwhile, suffered from Musical Everything–musical directors, musical cast members, musical writers…the internal strife and schisms could’ve torn this thing in pieces, but somehow…somehow…it was worth it.

The plot is surprisingly extensive for a comic book movie, and surprisingly simple for a movie with nearly a two hour runtime–the Punisher shows up, one night, at a mob party and does his standard thing, turning a room full of mobsters into a room full of mangled corpses in a matter of heartbeats.  One of the mobsters, the so-called Billy “the Beaut” Russoti, gets away, only to be pursued and ultimately mangled by the Punisher in a machine that recycles broken glass.  Russoti becomes Jigsaw, and moves to take over the mob and the entire city in the process.  From there, the Punisher goes forth to take out all the criminal lowlife types who’ve aligned themselves with Jigsaw, and also, hopefully, take out Jigsaw in the process.

First off, the casting is awesome.  Ray Stevenson blows Thomas Jane out of the water.  And Wayne Knight as Micro?  Oh, there could be no better call than that.  The rest of the cast, for the most part, puts on just spectacular performances, like Looney Bin Jim with the mirror encounter.

I know I’m being vague, and that’s actually quite intentional.  There are a panoply of eye-popping moments in Punisher: War Zone, and I won’t tell you what they are because you quite literally need to see them for yourself.  There’s one beautiful moment involving the Punisher getting frisky with a rocket launcher that actually challenged the Pencil Trick in terms of sheer awesome.  I hate to say that as I consider the Pencil Trick to be one of the greatest movie moments I’ve ever seen, but this was just too well done to not receive due consideration.  Few movies have ever caught the intent of the source material quite so well as Punisher: War Zone–I seldom see vigilantes quite so cold and yet frenetic as Frank Castle.

If there is a fault to be had in Punisher: War Zone, it’s the one-sided nature of pretty much every fight Frank gets involved in.  Every bad guy that confronts him, every cop that stops him, it’s only a matter of seconds before Frank punches through their heads or fires a shotgun round through their chests or impales them on a wrought-iron fence or does literally any of a hundred lethal acts in their general direction.  There’s almost no sense of suspense in this at all–it’s like some immutable law of nature or physics that says Frank Castle will inevitably win.  If this were Chuck Norris we were talking about, that’d be one thing, but surely there’s a difference here.

But this isn’t much of a problem, and frankly, Punisher: War Zone is clearly one of the greatest action movies of the last few years.  Top marks for sheer explosiveness and firepower, with lots of eye-popping moments and even a couple jaw-dropping ones.  They’ve even managed to put some funny moments in there, and for that, I thank them.  Yes, the ending is a foregone conclusion to anyone even vaguely familiar with the Punisher (and that’s NOT a spoiler, folks, that’s just honest fact), but it’s still well worth the ride to get there.

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