There have been a lot of rumors swirling around Punisher: War Zone, many of them about friction between director Lexi Alexander and the suits at Lionsgate. One of the scarier rumors was that the studio wanted Lexi to deliver a PG-13 cut of the film; anyone who saw the red band footage that premiered at Comic Con knew that the likely only saving grace of this movie would be the extreme, hardcore violence.
Well, fret no more – the latest round of MPAA ratings are here and Punisher: War Zone gets the big red R for ‘pervasive strong brutal violence,
language and some drug use.’ I would have liked to see titties mentioned in there, but I’ll take bloody death by chair leg any day.
So that’s out of the way. But keep in mind that Jonathan Hensleigh’s bad Punisher got that same ‘pervasive strong brutal violence’ and that movie was a sissy version of Frank Castle. Still, what we’ve seen blows that film out of the water, violence-wise. The question remains as to whether this movie will be watchable in between the kills.