We watched the Punisher War Zone movie last night. It’s recently out on DVD, and I had some hopes for it. Not high hopes, but hopes. I mean, I loved the Punisher comic in the old days. The short stretch when I actually collected comics in the 80s was right around the release of the original Punisher mini-series, a pretty awesome release for the time.

When he finally got his first regular series in the subsequent years, I embraced the title and tried to love it. And even though they softened his edges, I enjoyed it…but not enough to keep collecting. I mean, I found girls and fast lost interest in good old funny books, and though it was one of the last titles I continued to read, it didn’t last long.

I must say, I greatly enjoyed the Tom Jane Punisher movie from a couple years ago. Dark and gritty, and certainly violent, but the retelling of his back story made sense, and the movie was a nice, solid, action stomp.

But this new thing…what garbage. I mean, lousy performances, some of the worst accents I’ve EVER heard, and simply gratuitous violence. I feel like they skipped over some moments where they could have actually improved the script in favor of showing splashing blood and pulpy meat. It was violence so extreme that it became cartoonish.

And it didn’t need to be that way. There were certainly artful moments, touches of Ang Lee and John Woo and Luc Besson, but these only represented a fraction of the parts, and the whole they contributed to, well, lacked.

I know this was heavily influenced by the new generation Punisher, heavily driven by Garth Ennis material. Actor Ray Stevenson as the Punisher certainly lived up to this. He had the trademark slicked-back hair and physique bespeaking many many hours on elliptical and nautilus machines. He even did a decent menacing whisper.

I liked a lot of the film processing and color too. There were certain moments that were excellent visual representations of comic book artistry on film. One scene in particular, a church interior that did radiate a bit neon, as observed by Carol, but still, in its way, really looked like a comic book representation of a church interior. It made visual sense to me and I liked it for that.

But all the splashy blood, like so much Cherry Slurpee flying from necks and foreheads and chests and varied stumps… That is the kind of thing that may play in a still frame of a comic book, but on screen it makes me think of a first-person shooter that involves zombies, vampires, aliens or overzealous cheerleaders.

I felt like this was a screenplay written by comic book writers, and maybe this same story would have worked better in that format. The story itself was not awful, and with a few modifications probably could have been as effective and involving as the last Punisher film. But the direction was poor and focused more or the depiction of brutality and violence than the telling of a potentially interesting story. After all, like every classic comic hero, Frank Castle has a motivated back story that drives him to become a murderous vigilante. There’s no reason why you can’t have a bloody action flick with a little character growth and plot. I wish they’d pulled it off here.

Maybe the Wolverine movie will be better.