Punisher: War Zone: Review By MovieGuyScott

I would like to start off this review with a question, “Why can’t Hollywood give us an action movie that is primarily action?” Punisher: War Zone, suffers from the same thing that many action films have suffered from this year; they shoot a few action scenes, often poorly, and then surround them with nauseating melodrama.

This time around, the action scenes are alright, but the movie is still bogged down by seemingly 90 minutes of cheesy dialogue in its 107 minute runtime. In the opening action scene, which is the best in the movie, we see the Punisher killing a ridiculously large amount of people in a very short period of time. Of course it’s ridiculous; he punches through a man’s face and hits multiple people in the eyes with throwing knives within seconds of each other before spinning upside down on a chandelier and shooting everyone else in the room. 5 minutes into the movie we can tell this isn’t the serious Punisher that we’ve been waiting for. That doesn’t mean we can’t still have a good time. In some cases we do, after all, there are some satisfying kills and exciting action scenes. Just not nearly enough.

Let’s be honest, I don’t really care about the characters introduced in this movie. Some side characters can be fine, but make them humorous or find some way to make them endearing, so we don’t just want Frank Castle to kill them. The action scenes are funny in themselves, why can’t the characters have a sense of humor! Everyone talks as if their spouse or best friend has just been killed...

Ok, the point is, we too often see The Punisher being sad rather than mad, which isn’t what I want at all. I don’t want to have a depressing experience with this movie no matter how tragic the story may at times be. We all came to see the Punisher do what he does best, punish those who do evil to others. Instead, the audience is punished by an hour and a half of clunky dialogue from one-dimensional characters that we didn’t come to see in the first place.

Every character in this movie seems like the guy who shows up at the party, gets drunk, and starts crying. By the time he gets around to his second wife cheating on him nobody is having any fun. At this point, everyone’s wishing there was another party to go to, but unfortunately, there’s nowhere else to go.