‘PUNISHER: War Zone” is as strangely violent as a night out clubbing with Plaxico Burress.
When Frank Castle prowls for revenge after mobsters wipe out his family, a punch to the face results in a cave-in that suggests a hammer meeting a watermelon. A gunshot leaves half a head neatly chopped off, as though with a cleaver. Sudden impalings are also a big favorite.
Returning in a sequel to a 2004 movie that was not crying out for one, Castle, a k a the Punisher (Ray Stevenson), has no superpowers – unless you count an ability to be dull. Each minute of this movie passed like a week on jury duty.
Castle is after Jigsaw, played by Dominc West. He played Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire,” and has thus been busted down from one of the best TV shows ever to an action spectacular seemingly designed to fill in late night slots on German cable TV.
This miscreant is a Mafioso with a comical accent who survives being dropped in a glass compactor but sustains a Leatherface-style makeover as a result. Jigsaw had to go to a free clinic to get it stitched together because “Insurance said I missed a payment.”
After he suffers the loss of a team of henchmen led by an Irish Rastafarian gymnast (no, it doesn’t make sense in the movie, either) who is doing somersaults over the rooftops when the Punisher extinguishes him with a shoulder-fired missile, Jigsaw hooks up with his demented cannibal brother. To him, in a moment of weakness, Jigsaw tearfully confesses, “Just when I think I’m OK, I see my reflection somewhere . . . I look horrible!”
The movie keeps using shots of the Empire State Building to try to convince us it has something to do with New York, albeit one in which an el train runs over 23rd Street, the A train stops at a station identified as “5th Avenue and 13th Street,” people live in cozy single-family houses with leafy front lawns, and a place called “the Brad Street Hotel” hosts a convocation of baddies dedicated to wiping out the Punisher.
Down in a subway tunnel, the Punisher maintains a curious lair stocked with musical instruments, a tea kettle and a wing chair. Occasionally he talks strategy with a doomed glasses-wearing fellow named Microchip, played by the guy who played Newman on “Seinfeld,” or suggests a higher purpose to his vigilante creed when he says, “Sometimes I’d like to get my hands on God.”
With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It’s anti-ept.
PUNISHER: WAR ZONE
Explosively bad.
Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (graphic violence, profanity, drug abuse). At the E-Walk, the Kips Bay, the 84th Street, others.