The Populist Warning of Punisher: War Zone

Frank Castle found himself a man out of time by December 2008. Seven months prior, Iron Man took a similarly second-tier comic character and irrevocably changed superhero cinema thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s knack for snarky one-liners and ne'er-do-well empathy. The Dark Knight followed suit that July when it tapped into the zeitgeist with its thinly veiled Bush-Obama-Bin Laden allegory and the media frenzy around the untimely death of Heath Ledger. The climate should have been right for Punisher: War Zone during its holiday release. But, it was dead on arrival, grossing just under $9 million dollars–a quarter of its modestly successful 2004 predecessor starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta. 

As news poured in about the almost-assassination of President Trump last weekend as well as the Right’s newfound mastery of cancel culture, an early Marvel misfire may seem far removed from our social media-fueled polarization. But few films have proven so far-sighted, so opposed to the manufactured optimism of the Obama coalition that they manage to speak directly to the erosion of our common culture in ways audiences still aren’t quite able to handle. 

Directed by Lexi Alexander, the sequel follows Castle (the late Ray Stevenson as Jane’s replacement) with his bloodlust unabated as he sets out to cleanse all corners of NYC from organized crime’s unchallenged control. After an unhinged mafia dinner massacre that opens the film, Castle tussles with low-level mobster Billy “The Beaut” Russotti (Dominic West), who meets his seeming demise in a glass crusher before resurrecting himself as Jigsaw–the physical manifestation of all the evils The Punisher has deluded himself into believing he’d quelled. 

While the film blew through multiplexes in less than two weeks, constructing an anatomy of its failure proves difficult amid the era’s sociocultural milieu. Two months after War Zone’s release, Liam Neeson’s actioner Taken became a rare $100+ million January hit that showed audience interest in vigilante film had only grown in the months since the release of the biggest Batman outing in movie history. Between Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, Marvel was on the upswing. As The Dark Knight and outrage over its Best Picture snub proved, audiences had a newfound taste for comic book bleakness that would play out in the light vs. dark, Marvel-DC factions over the next decade.

At its core, Punisher: War Zone’s tepid response from audiences and critics likely stems from Alexander’s anarchic refusal to conform to such aesthetic dichotomies. While its predecessor opted for largely ineffective melodrama, this outing finds Castle suffering from the same type of vindictive tunnel vision that plagued Daniel Craig in that November’s wildly underrated Bond entry, Quantum of Solace. It immerses itself in a world of Gotham-like brutality while ratcheting up the gory realism Nolan’s Batman left implied for the sake of four-quadrant appeal. 

Yet, Alexander is unafraid to infuse her neo-noir world with smarmy Starkish asides (and even visual gags not out of place in a Looney Tunes entry). More importantly, she refuses to repress the material’s camp tendencies, creating a sense of cognitive dissonance that replicates the experience of comic book reading much more effectively than the more overt experimentation of Ang Lee’s 2003 take on Hulk or the desaturated metropolis of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s 2005 Sin City. 

Consequently, Alexander commits the greatest of sins: intentionally evading all gestures toward prestige at a time when the comic book movie was desperately trying to legitimize itself. Instead, she opts to make an anything-goes action pic that revels in its B-movie glory. And the result is a film that, more than any other, captures the anxieties that led to Obama’s ascension while remaining deeply cynical about institutions’ effectiveness at solving the problems that, for the first time, had brought American decline into public consciousness. Like Christain Bale and Liam Neeson, Stevenson is yet another actor from across the pond tasked with embodying a quintessentially American hero, an indicator that even the heirs to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood were fair game for outsourcing in the early aughts. 

Alexander’s New York is a place of goofy cops unequipped to handle the task at hand–who succumb much more to bureaucratic softness than the allure of corruption that infected Commissioner Gordon’s ranks. Of politicians more concerned about self-preservation than the brass tacks of change as they cultivate an environment where The Punisher and his targets must get leaner and meaner. Of an urban hellhole devoid of hope in which Jigsaw can set himself up as a demagogue for the downtrodden during one of the most bombastic and brilliant monologue-fueled montages ever put to film. The Punisher may have made Jigsaw, but both are the product of a federal government using the eroding American middle class as cannon fodder on the path to the type of neoliberal infringements that spawned a counterculture of MAGA hats and Hillbilly Elegy. 

Though Jigsaw spends War Zone bordering on caricature, he’s also an apt symbol for the urban decay central to The Wire–the pioneering HBO drama that ended earlier that spring and made West and his portrayal of alcoholic detective Jimmy McNulty pillars of both prestige cable and liberal cocktail party chatter. Alexander takes a completely different tack than that series’s maverick journalist turned-showrunner David Simon. However, the German-Palestinian filmmaker is arguably as effective at diagnosing the faltering American Experiment. For all of its prescience, The Wire and its imitators neither offered the clear-eyed assessment of Obama’s globalized masquerade nor the fringe populism of Trump and Bernie as the next stage in America’s political evolution that are central to Alexander’s comics adaptation. 

If such potent social subtext weren’t enough, Punisher: War Zone also proves itself quite adept at subverting its not-quite-straight-to-DVD aesthetic to ruthlessly critique the role of violence in American culture. Like Eli Roth’s Hostel films, Rob Zombie’s Southern-fried Firefly trilogy, and Alexandre Aja’s remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha, Alexander’s movie takes up the “torture porn” mantle. She executes scenes of violence so grotesque and over-the-top that they implicate the audience’s voyeurism, forming a clear moral code that refuses to elide the individual's role in a flatlining national culture besieged by the demons of War on Terror rhetoric and long-festering economic crises. 

Amid the carnage, Alexander wants us to feel. Her Punisher is neither an alt-Right paragon nor a scapegoat for Jordan Peterson’s adopted progeny. Like the innocents caught up in Jigsaw’s well-disguised quest for personal enrichment, he’s yet another victim. But he also knows there's no easy answer to the wave of darkness surrounding him. The only way forward is a sense of self-sacrifice that may strip him of his humanity but could ultimately show us what’s left of ours.  

Punisher: War Zone is now streaming on Prime.