So recently I saw two recent actioners on DVD, and under similar circumstances. I wasn’t expecting much from either. Each had poor Rotten Tomato aggregates (Transporter 3 a 38%, Punisher War Zone a lowly 26%). Plus I was watching them on DVD, free rentals from the library, so right there you bring different expectations then if you go the expense and bother of seeing the movies in a theater.
Then there were the films at hand. Transporter 3 was from the Luc Besson assembly line, and frankly, although I’ve seen a lot of Besson films–he’s one of the few people who’s been working the action field consistently for twenty years–I’ve never really found any one of them particularly satisfying. At best, like Taken, they seemed a competent three star flick, and few of them reached even those heights on the Ken-o-Meter. The previous two chapters in that particular series were, respectively, OK and meh.
Meanwhile, The Punisher War Zone film drew really bad reviews–again, 26% on RT. The previous two attempts at bringing the character to the screen were a) a disaster, and b) overlong and more than a little problematic.
In other words, my bar was set pretty low for both movies. Given my expectations, a two to two and a half star movie in either case would have gotten the job done. Yet one film, well, sucked donkey, and the other way surpassed my admittedly low expectations. Still, the latter is one of those little flicks that keeps us slogging through the junk. It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised once in a while.
The loser was Transporter 3–well, technically, I was the loser–and man, it indeed blew. And that’s not just my opinion, because Techmaster Paul and his wife Holly felt the same way. I knew it was a bad sign when the DVD box said the movie ran an hour and 45 minutes. Why the hell does a Transporter movie have to run that long? What happened to ninety minute movies?
And those extra 15 minutes were indeed excruciatingly fatty. Again, I wasn’t expecting much here, but even so I ended up hating this movie. The problems were manifold, but basically start with the most lackadaisical and unfocused plot (the Transporter again has to get a hot chick ‘package’ to a certain place at a certain time, at the risk of death, but despite having a bomb implanted in himself to keep him on track, he endlessly seems to take field trips whenever the mood strikes him).
Worse, the main character, previously the Bestest and Coolest and Most Professionalist Wheels Man in the World, is suddenly an utter moron; although he will literally explode if he gets more than like fifty feet from his car (that’s the plot), he at one point leaves it to make a phone call at a pay phone, and walks away from his car leaving the door unlocked and the engine running. This leads to another ridiculous action chase, which isn’t the problem so much as the fact that it’s hard to care when the hero is such an outright idiot.
The heroine is another Hot Slinky Emotionally Damaged Euro Petite Chick, of a type newly popular (Hit Man and Quantum of Solace both star the current HSEDEPC archetype, Olga Kurylenko) but long a mainstay of Besson’s films, starting with his then wife Milla Jovovich in 1997’s The Fifth Element. So she cries a lot and has her copious Party Girl masquera run all over her face, and acts all slutty, and takes drugs and gets them into jepordy over and over again because she has to act like a jackass, but it’s OK, because it’s all because inside she’s a damaged little girl with Daddy issues, and so she and the Transporter fall in lurv, which was strangely nausiating considering how completely predictable it was. I guess it was because I was just hating both characters by that point.
Oh, and there’s a “sexy” scene where she can’t quite reach a gas station mini-mart bathroom (she also has a bomb in her, and since the Transporter is again a complete moron in this movie, when he parks his car to gas up he picks the gas pump farthest from the gas station building despite the fact that he knows she’s going to go shopping in there), she instead squats in an aisle, looks seductively at the at this point still hostile Transporter, shimmies out of her panties and pisses on the floor. Call me bourgeois, but ee-yuck. Yet I guess Besson likes this sort of thing, since a similar piss acts at the occasion of Jet Li seeing Bridget Fonda for the first time in Kiss of the Dragon.
I guess the idea is that these movies are now supposed to be ‘fun,’ in that way that means that the viewer supposedly has no right to complain that previously established characters are now complete fools. And I’m telling you, the film’s languid pace literally had me shouting at the TV after a while. All in all, I really loathed this film, and again, it was something for which my highest hopes were that it would be somewhat competent.
Oh, and although I was surprised at how bad an actress the female lead was, I wasn’t after I read this on the IMDB: “While working as a hairdresser at a salon, she was discovered by Luc Besson, the co-writer of Transporter 3, in New York, when she crossed a street. He gave her acting lessons and cast her as the female lead in Transporter 3.” I hope Besson really liked the sex. Hell, I’m sure he did. If so, at least somebody was satisfied with her. I should note that she hasn’t again worked after starring in an international theatrical action film.
I saw T3 a month ago, and you can see that thinking about it still brings bile to my mouth.
This weekend, meanwhile, I watched Punisher War Zone. Again, I wasn’t expecting much, given the character’s previous cinematic offerings and the thuddingly bad reviews. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Sometimes you just want a cheeseburger (OK, I personally ALWAYS want a cheeseburger) instead of something fancier, and PWZ fits the bill.
If the Dolph Lundgren version was just an inept, cheapie flop (and it was), and the Thomas Jane one didn’t know what the hell it wanted to be, trying to add ‘depth’ to the Punisher concept while also employing extremely wild mood changes from one scene to the next, well, PWZ knows EXACTLY what it is and what it should deliver. And it does so, in spades.
I kind of see what they were thinking with the Jane version, making him a more sophisticated version of a punisher, one who seeks to provide an elaborate and apt punishment based on one’s crimes. However, Jane was a bit stuff, John Travolta hammed up the place as the villain (and not in a good way), and the film just basically rambled around. Seriously, the ‘director’s cut’ of the film ran 141 minutes!!!! For a Punisher movie!
PWZ runs a far slimmer 103 minutes, and I feared that even this would be too long. However, whereas T3 just wasted a bunch of our time during it’s similar running time, PWZ keeps on trucking. Things seldom bog down, and each scene is kept to a minimum before we move on. I award it the rarest of all praise for modern films; it’s efficient.
And because of this, it’s more effective. Although Frank Castle’s–a.k.a. the Punisher’s–backstory here is established in about ten seconds’ worth of silent flashbacks, his pain is communicated and felt much more deeply than in the Jane version, in which we waste a whole lot of time meeting his entire extended family (dozens of people), all of whom we watch get slaughtered at length.
Hollywood’s inane compulsion to overexplain everything at excruciating length to make sure we ‘get’ it is well illustrated in the contrast between the two approaches. See, the Punisher is an ex-special forces guy whose wife and young kids are collateral damage during a mob hit. In response, he goes underground and spends all his time killing gangsters by the busload. How much explication do you need here? As it turns out, not a whole hell of a lot. Here’s an idea the film industry REALLY needs to mull over: Less is more.
This Punisher doesn’t waste time planning elaborate revenges, either. Like in the comic book, he just employs vastly superior firepower to kills as many bad guys as possible as quickly as possible. Castle must kill well over a hundred people in his movie just by himself, and (be warned) in extremely gory fashion. The tone is set when he invades a mafia dinner party and hews and stabs and shoots his way through a dozen people or more in about twenty seconds. I was also afraid that we were going to get a ton of slo-mo, CGI bullet effects and crap, but for the most part they keep things simple. Thanks for that.
Ray Stevenson is easily the best Punisher so far, taciturn without being a Lundgren-esque lump, and displaying a quiet charisma that I’ve never detected from Jane. The film provides him with a pretty believable moral quandry at one point, and this allows us to see Castle’s pain over all he’s lost without beating us over the head with it. Meanwhile, Wayne Knight gives an actual performance, and I rather liked Dominic West’s broad ‘goobam’ take on Castle’s antagonist Jigsaw, which fit the old comic book character.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing this as some sort of modern classic or anything. Still, it paid the bills, which is a lot more than T3 or the previous two Punisher movies did. Sadly, the film bombed (and I mean it BOMBED; I hope the reviews didn’t kill it), because it’s one I’d actually have enjoyed seeing a sequel to. In any case, my advice is to skip T3 and stick with PWZ, especially if all you want is an hour and forty minutes of quality mayhem.
