IGX

I actually won a radio call in for 2 free passes to Punisher:Warzone, so I went on Tuesday afternoon and me and my buddy had the whole theater to ourselves.
This was good because it was like hanging in my livng room.

This thing starts off ultra fucking VIOLENT! Within 5 minutes The Punisher is decapitating elderly Mob bosses , spiking knives into Mab soldier's skulls and chewing them up with automatic pistols.

To comapre it with the last Punisher movie; (The one staring Ivan Drago is like Conan the Destroyer or Highlander 2, just forget it exist.) where as the last one was within the realms of reality, i.e a determined Spec Ops man who wants to die could do all that and the gunplay was realistic, this one goes back to the comic book world. The Armament Smurfs are hard at work making sure a 30 round mag contains about 80 rounds and you can have a war in NYC without the cops showing up. (well then again?)

But that is actually one of the things I liked about this, it took me back to reading the old Warzone comics in the early 90s. Short of doing Garth Enus's "Kitchen Irish" or " Punisher Born" this was the best coarse they could take with the film. I hope Stevenson does another.

Also The Punisher is back to being a big, intimidating physical presence., something Ray Stevenson pulls off well and Thomas Jane can't (The Punisher is between 6'2"-4", not 5'10")
You can buy that Jane's Punisher can kill you, but he would not intimidate on sight, Stevenson makes the badguys shit themselves before fireing a shot.

This Punisher is not the saddend reluctent warrior, he's the enraged psychopath on a suiciadal death trip, out to take as many scumbags with him as he can. All the same he is still human and when he mistakenly kills a Fed, leaving his family fatherless it effects him greatly, almost quitting his private war but deciding that he must now protect them from Jigsaw's crew.
(Hint, dont fucking ever point a gun at a little girl around him=)

The main enemy is Jigsaw, who those who remember the boks will know well.
Dominic West plays him to the bone and his brother, LBJ (Looney Bin Jim) is a wild, crazed psycho.

The end battle in a bombed out hotel, with every stereo typical bad guy is pure gun porn. Black Thugs, Chinese Tongs, Italian Mafia, Irish hoods, Skinheads and Russian mobsters ("Gencidall mainiacs from the old Country I thought would stir up some shit." says the Fed who helps the Punisher arrange some Devide and Conquer.)
Lots of violence and gore, lots of the Punisher taken hits and keeping going on pure hatred, lots of headsplatterinbg from full auto M-4 burst at point blank range and all the other things a Punisher fan, like me wants to see in his hero.

4 out of 5 Guns, right up there with the last Rambo flick for retrabution through ultra violent action.

The Punisher makes Batman look like a Granola eating Hippie, Batman will spare the lives of his enemies so he is doomed to fight them again (And they keep killing the innocent). The Punisher cuts no such breaks, as the LaParkour doing methhead who gives him info finds out.
( You will laugh your ass off when one of them is doing a cartwheel and is taken out by a Rocket.)

See it in the theatrs for the full effect, but I will own it when it hits stores! (ANd add it to those dvds I hide from my Son.)

DARTH wrote: The Punisher makes Batman look like a Granola eating Hippie...

Haha. Nice review. I was wondering about this one. I liked the Thomas Jane version because it was a good movie and set in Tampa, of all places. Being from N. Florida I dug that.

I'll check this out.

Does he have a diamond-tip manicure like the comics?