A grotesquely straight-faced comic book disaster that plays much better as a comedy ratchets up the R-rated violence on Disney Plus

No offense intended to the late, great Ray Stevenson – who was drastically underrated as a comic book character that’s already been played by four actors spanning three movies, two TV shows, and a four reboots in just over 30 years – but Punisher: War Zone is just terrible.

One of the most infamous flops in the history of live-action Marvel adaptations, director Lexi Alexander’s brutally violent and relentlessly self-serious shoot ’em up couldn’t even recoup a third of its $35 million budget at the box office, and was panned six feet under and then some by critics for good measure.

That being said, War Zone has spent the last decade and a half cultivating a reputation as one of the cultiest cult classics that’s ever cult classiced in the history of superhero cinema, and with a very good reason. If you ignore the intent and simply watch the film as an absurdist comedy, then it’s an absolutely joyous blast of demented entertainment.

Whether or not Alexander had any desire to generate laughs or deliberately position her grotesquely bloodstained masterpiece as anything other than a dark and dingy actioner remains up for debate, but it’s unquestionably the superior way to get your kicks out of a poorly-made, badly-lit, and relentlessly grim slog of an R-rated adaptation.

It doesn’t exactly scream “family-friendly entertainment,” but that hasn’t prevented Punisher: War Zone from emerging on the global most-watched list of Disney Plus per FlixPatrol, with Marvel’s desire to gather as many titles from the back catalogue giving subscribers the good, the bad, and the ugly all at once, which neatly sums up the whole movie.