Punisher: War Zone (Blu-ray)

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Video:
"Punisher: War Zone" is a surprisingly colorful movie, a decision that works well for the film in separating it from the previous drab Punisher movies and makes great use of the 1080P widescreen transfer. Everything from the colored glass that transforms Billy Russo into Jigsaw to the gallons of blood and multiple exploding heads vividly pop of the screen in explosions of color.

Audio:
With the exception of a classic Machines of Loving Grace song, the rest of the soundtrack is a horrible collection of bad recent metal tunes. It´s an annoying collection of songs that I´d rather never have to hear again, but they are ultimately deafened by the thousands of rounds of ammunition fired throughout the film. The 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track doesn´t sound as good as I would have liked; it´s clear but the effects just don´t have the punch I had hoped to hear.

Extras:
In addition to a feature-length commentary with director Lexi Alexander and her director of photography, the disc includes five featurettes totaling about twenty-six minutes. While the three-and-half minute "Meet Jigsaw" does a fantastic job of showcasing the prosthetic work West had to endure and his fun-loving good nature, the remaining bonus features are fairly average and unrewarding fluff pieces. I was surprised that there were no featurettes covering the excessive use of digital blood or practical effects and nothing devoted to the comic book origins of their Punisher. But given one of the silly comments from the DP found on "Creating the Look of the Film," where he states that this is "The Garth Ennis-style Punisher brought to life on screen with all the colors and all the action," maybe it´s better that they didn´t. As a lifelong comic fan, it´s always hilarious to hear some Hollywood type try and talk about comics as if they ever opened one in their life. Ennis is routinely recognized as the writer who made The Punisher darker than he ever was before. He took him out of New York and put him in real-life situations around the globe. The Punisher featured in "War Zone" is a direct version of every take on the Punisher that wasn´t written by Ennis and to suggest anything otherwise is simply naïve.

Film Value:
"Punisher: War Zone" was some of the most fun I had in a theater during 2008, and I had just as much fun rewatching it on Blu-ray. Unlike the previous Punisher films, it refuses to take itself seriously and realizes that it takes place in a colorful, living world where the basic rules of reality no longer apply. A perfect example of the film´s over-the-top antics takes place in a scene where Castle dispatches the film´s most annoying villains, a group of Parkour (Google it) enthusiasts known as The Urban Free Flow Gang. The filmmakers utilize these "extreme" villains to showcase what´s wrong with today´s forgettable action flicks, and when the Punisher finally takes them out it´s a visceral satisfaction that had me applauding in the theater. How often do you get to see a bad guy dropped from a building and impaled on a metal fence, followed by the hero dropping from the roof, landing on the villain´s head and neck to soften the jump, and then finishing the job? That´s exactly the kind of flick "Punisher: War Zone" is, and it makes no apologies for it with zero plot, with all the villains characterized by their ethnicity, and with brutally violent content rarely seen in today´s action films. If you´re looking for a thoughtful, dramatic action film, go fall asleep halfway through ´Quantum of Solace"; if you want an enjoyable, memorable comic-book movie that mirrors its thirty-two-page counterpart, check out "Punisher: War Zone."