Mayhem for the holidays
If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then "Punisher: War Zone" has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short. This third movie iteration of the Marvel comic book barges into the holiday season like a skinhead crashing the office Christmas party, breaking furniture and puking in the punch. You'll either be horrified or grateful for the diversion.
Actually, "War Zone" bears little relation to the two earlier "Punisher" films, the 1989 version starring Dolph Lundgren or the 2004 reboot featuring Thomas Jane. Now it's the glowering, towering British actor Ray Stevenson ("King Arthur," TV's "Rome") who plays Frank Castle, the Special Forces commando turned anti-Mafia vigilante.
Frank doesn't wear a mask - he doesn't care who recognizes him - but instead sports a white-skulled black T-shirt and enough armaments to start a minor border incident. The plot of "War Zone" finds the hero accidentally murdering an undercover FBI agent and reeling with guilt - Stevenson expresses this by tensing a brow muscle - while vowing to kill New York mobster Billy the Beaut (Dominic West). The latter has had a little incident with a bottle-recycling machine; looking at his gruesomely stitched-up face in the mirror, he dubs himself Jigsaw.
For a movie primarily concerned with exploding heads, "War Zone" is surprisingly busy with characters: It's almost a B-grade Guy Ritchie knockoff. There's a smart Fed (Colin Salmon) and a dumb cop (Dash Mihok), a psycho secondary bad guy (Doug Hutchison) and an Irish Rasta who does parkour (Keram Malicki-Sanchez), a Romanian (David Vadim) trading in bio-warfare, and a computer nerd who looks suspiciously like Newman on "Seinfeld" (Wayne Knight). The Punisher even has time to glumly romance the widow (Julie Benz) of the man he killed while cheering up her little daughter (Stephanie Janusauskas) with a tour of New York's subway tunnels.
But these movies exist for the mayhem, not the characters, and "Punisher: War Zone" is enthusiastically violent even for its genre. If most of the budget has gone to ordnance and blood squibs, director Lexi Alexander films the sprays of gore with an artisan's eye, and the results make effective if morally indefensible movie red meat.
Incidentally, the filmmaker's own story is pretty interesting: A German-born stuntwoman and kickboxing champion, Alexander is making her feature debut here after a handful of short films, one of which (2003's "Johnny Flynton") was Oscar-nominated. Maybe someone should make a movie about her.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston .com/movienation. 