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TAKEN

Seeing as there was no films about Zombie Nazi’s left at the old blockbuster store, Inferno and myself decided to rent a more mainstream, but still blokey film. I had only heard good things about this movie and I was pretty optimistic.

The plot: Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA agent who is trying to be closer to his daughter as she grows into a young woman. The pressures of his old lifestyle has already broken his marriage and his daughter now lives with her cunt of a mother who has shacked up with some old rich dude that keeps trying to buy her affection. Mills realises that he has to make up for all the time he was away on missions as his daughter was growing up, when she asks if she can travel in Europe for a few weeks with a friend, he is reluctant but realises that he may loose her if he doesn’t allow her to grow up.

Turns out this was a bad idea, as she is only in France a few hours when her friend and her are kidnapped by Albanian pimps. She is on the phone to her father as it happens and he talks to one of the abductors, vowing to use his CIA skills to track them down and kill them all. When he arrives in France, it doesn’t take him long to start putting clues together and soon he is on to there case. Cue the onslaught of uber violence as he beats, shoots, explodes and brutally tortures his way through the European underworld in order to locate his beloved daughter.

Neeson is outstanding in this movie. To be honest, he has made a living out of playing stony faced serious types and you know what? He does it here again… but he does it so well that you just have to love him for it. He is about 55 now, but he still comes across as a pretty fit dude. You can honestly believe that he can handle himself as you are presented with him taking on an entire crack house full of Albanian scum bags and handing them the beat down of the millennium.

The violence is pretty extreme, not overly gory, just you can see the rage inside Nessons character as he desperately tries to get his daughter back. It soon becomes apparent that he will stop at nothing to achieve this. One scene in particular conveys this, he tortures a man by ramming two 6 inch nails into his thigh bones, then attaches them to the house mains via crocodile clips…. OOCHAAA!!! Also heads get smashed in car doors, a dude gets a broken bottle stabbed into his chest, another gets a fire extinguisher rammed off his face 8 or 9 times and more people get chopped in the throat than I care to remember.

This movie is dark and violent, but I still think that most women will still enjoy it, as every moment in this film, you can see the love that Neesons character has for his daughter. You know that although he is being a brutal monster at times, it is all spawned for that love that can never be broken. Have to say it again, Neeson is unbelievably good in this!!!

Dark, broody, violent, intelegent film making, that is a relief after this years wishy washy cinema realises.

Verdict: 9/10

Let it TAKE your attention to the darker side of life.

PUNISHER: WARZONE

Well as you can all tell, everyone here at Fightrunner HQ is a HUGE fan of the Marvel comic book hero The Punisher. Since we showed you the awesomely violent trailer for his latest movie incarnation “Punisher Warzone, we have all been waiting for it with baited breath. So when i saw it was out last weekend, I nearly pissed in my pants with excitement… Only to be bitterly disappointed in the fact that my local Cinema in Aberdeen wasn’t showing it for fuck know what reason!!!!

So what did I do? Well I did the only sane thing I could do… me and Inferno saddled up our horses (Mazda 6) and headed south to the nearest cinema, approx 55 miles away… I know its sad but we just needed our violence fix, and we needed it bad!

Punisher: Warzone doesn’t exactly follow on from his last incarnation played by Thomas Jane. This time the gun toting vigilante’s boots are filled by Ray Stevenson of Rome fame.

As a mob boss celebrates his 100th birthday in style, surrounded by all his underworld crones, the Punisher sees this as a perfect opportunity to clear the cities troubles out once and for all. He kicks of the party by decapitating the 100 year old Don before stirring up a shit storm in an almighty gun fight. This battle leaves a huge gap in the underworld which is soon filled by one Billy the Bute, so old Frank Castle decides he deserves some punishment… no scratch that gunishment too. After taking his crew apart, he bungs Billy into a glass recycler (big whirley churney up machine) but soon his rampage is cut short as he relises that one of the despatched henchmen was in fact an undercover FBI agent.

Now torn with the guilt of what he has done, Frank decides to give up the Punisher game, not for long though (yeah you saw that coming didn’t you?). It would seem the whurley machine didn’t finish off Billy and now hes back in town with his face all stitched up, calling himself “Jigsaw” and stirring up trouble. Time for the Punisher to get back into action!!!!

Sorry that went on for a bit really…. I was really really looking forward to this, especially after I heard he kills over 250 people in it and 30 of them in the first 10 mins. But to be honest it didn’t quite “be all it could be”! For sure all the violence was there… I mean fuck me was it there, I would go into all the gruesome killings but it would just spoil it for you really! But the film just didn’t live up to the comics for me. It was a mishmash of all the Marvel Max (adult editions) comics written by Garth Ennis… but the script just seemed rushed. I feel if they had just kept to one of the original brilliant stories this movie really could have been the action film of 2009.

One thing I will say, this truly is more of a Punisher movie than the Thomas Jane one, who incidentally didn’t want to make this one due to the level of violence involved, I mean what the fuck??? Its the Punisher… try reading the comic dude, he doesn’t go about getting people to sign petitions or something. I loved the cheesey 80’s version staring Dolf Lungren, but still this movie has more bite and Stevenson suits the part far more than the other two. He looks more the part and his style is certainly more that of Castle himself.

For me it was still a bloody good watch, in the same way that I can enjoy mindless violence films of the 80’s, I can enjoy this. That’s all it was made for, and before you say it ladies… this film was made by a woman!!! Ha, stick that in your pipe and smoke it bitch!!!!

Verdict: 7/10

If you like guns and grousome deaths, this is the movie for you… if not you should be PUNISHED!!!