Punisher: War Zone

...is completely fucking awesome and needs to be seen by you NOW.

It's just this side of ironic that the whole "hook" of Punisher as a comic character is that he's essentially a "realistic" movie-vigilante transplanted into a superhero-vigilante world, hence translating him "back" to film has always been slightly difficult. Here, they've finally made it work by letting Punisher bring the "comic-book-ness" of his world to the movies with him: We've got a hero who's basically yet another John Rambo/"Death Wish" heavily-armed urban crimefighter set up against a villian - the disfigured gangster Jigsaw - who's additude and operations are right out "Batman." And yet, it finally.

Plotwise, it's uncomplicated: Frank Castle (Ray Stevenson, officially an action star) aka "The Punisher" is an ex-military hardass who's waging a one-man war on NYC organized crime after seeing his wife and kids killed for witnessing a mob hit. He hits a moral dilema upon learning that his most-recent mob mass-execution has produced a pair of unintended consequences: Firstly, he's unwittingly placed psychotic low-level thug Billy "The Beaut" Russoti (Domonic West) - now bearing horrible facial scars and rechristened "Jigsaw" - into leadership as the sole survivor of The Family; and secondly that one of the hoods he DID kill was actually an undercover FBI agent - which puts the law MUCH more heavily on his trail and places the late agent's widow and daughter into imminent Jigsaw-related danger. Do ya suppose maybe he'll consider hanging it all up, only to see... I dunno, maybe evil rising in his absence and realize he's the only one who can keep doing what he's doing? I wonder...

The details all seemingly grow out of the Marvel Studios mandate to "listen to the fans" that informed "Iron Man" and this year's OTHER successful "reboot" of "The Incredible Hulk." For all the talk of drawing from Garth Ennis' recent work with the character, this version of Punisher hews most closely to the characters mainstream comics heyday in the 1980s - right down to amusing supporting roles for complicit Detective Soap and tech-saavy Microchip (Wayne Knight in a surprising "straight" semi-dramatic turn.)

Otherwise, it's all about how many bullets can be fired, how many faces can be blown-up/caved-in, how many explosives can be set off and how many times the audience can be made to applaud the sheer bravado with which "Green Street Hooligans" director Lexi Alexander - a stuntwoman and former kickboxing champion turned filmmaker - piles on the badassery like she's on a one-woman mission to out-testosterone every male action director on the planet. She comes pretty damn close, too. It's easy to imagine this film taking away "Crank's" crown as the ultraviolent "guy movie" to beat.

This is everything I want in a Punisher movie, and damn near everything I want in an action movie. Taken on it's own terms, it's damn near perfect.