Movie Reviews: Punisher: War Zone
5 December 2008, Imdb.com
Roger Ebert is disappointed. The Chicago Sun-Times critic writes, "You used to be able to depend on a bad film being poorly made. No longer." What irks Ebert is the latest Marvel Comics-to-film entrant, Punisher: War Zone, which Ebert pronounces "one of the best-made bad movies I've seen." He goes on: "It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it's disgusting." Kyle Smith in the New York Post obviously thinks that Ebert gives the film far too much credit. "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," he remarks. Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News goes further, saying that the movie "looks like it was made expressly to fill up discount bins." A.O. Scott in the New York Times writes that he sat through the film wonder, "What did I ever do to deserve this?" He's more specific: "Guys get their heads blown off, or severed, or pierced with chair legs, or pulverized with fists, because that's what they have coming and that's what the fan base will pay money to see. But does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it's supposed to be pandering to?" But Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle insists the movie should go down well among those who "can appreciate the high level of gore and assorted sadistic weirdness." He observes that a relatively low budget "ensured that director Lexi Alexander was going to make a B movie, so she embraces its B-movie qualities and crafts a memorable piece of entertainment." And Ty Burr in the Boston Globe figures that the moviegoers who buy tickets for Punisher recognize that it exists "for the mayhem, not the characters. ... If most of the budget has gone to ordnance and blood squibs, director Lexi Alexander films the sprays of gore with an artisan's eye, and the results make effective if morally indefensible movie red meat."
