Slashing The Seats

Firstly, a confession. When I was a bogey-encrusted, bad-breathed 10 year old boy, I was obsessed with The Punisher. Blissfully unaware that there were far cooler superheros for a youngster to be fascinated by, I had my bedroom wall painted black, with a lovingly rendered white skull emblazoned over the top. I had my school lunch box similarly repainted. Where once there was a spot colour, as-purchased and off-the-shelf Mask Crusaders logo, there was soon a Punisher emblem perfected in Dulux paint once I’d had my way.

Looking over my primary school exercise books, every other story I wrote for creative writing was about The Punisher. By far my proudest possessions were a few shoeboxes stacked with dog-eared and knackered copies of the British editions. The fact that I later used these old comics to hide copies of Mayfair and Whitehouse don’t change one iota the fact that, for an important period of my childhood, I bloody loved the Punisher.

I am no longer 10 years old and am now wise enough not to be disappointed by the news of another attempt to bring Frank Castle’s raging alter ego to the screen. It couldn’t be any worse than the Dolph Lundgren disaster, after all, let alone the more recent one with John Travolta. I was enthusiastic to see what they’d done with a character who, along with quite a few other comic book heros, will never, ever suit Hollywood – being just too amoral (or morally simplistic), way too violent and far, far too cold-blooded to suit the big screen.

A quick catch up might be necessary if, quite reasonably, the idea of a man in a black spandex suit with loads of massive guns never interested you and The Punisher passed you by. Frank Castle served in Vietnam, raised a family and then saw that family die at the hands of the Mafia during a botched execution. Thus, The Punisher was born, swearing to avenge the death of his wife and child by murdering every single gang member he encounters using a variety of automatic and non-automatic weapons.

Firstly, this new outing probably warrants its 18 certificate. Endless scenes of violence include a pensioner’s blown-apart cranium, a man losing his face in a bottle-crusher and a kidney being bitten out of an obese man’s ribcage. We’re witness to a the full range of GBH indecency to the point where faces being split open with gunfire become a bore. It’s so relentless it becomes, aptly, a fading cartoon.

Aside from the violence, the only thing of note (aside from, for once, a half-decent portrayal of the big man himself) is the presence of The Wire’s Dominic West – or McNulty to his friends in Baltimore. Here he plays Jigsaw – a gang leader with a reconstituted face. How West made the transition from a carefully nuanced police drama about gang-bangers to a to completely ludicrous version of the same is something only he could know.

Punisher: War Zone’s main problem is that the audience it best suits won’t be able to get in to see it. Any kid can get his hand on all the two dimensional gunfire gut-puncture imagery he fancies, but that 18 certificate means the only people like to see this are either hardcore comic book fans who weren’t disappointed by the first two efforts, a handful of children donning false moustaches or, more shamefully, nostalgia-seeking, thirty-something adults who should know better.

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