Rating: *Pitiful. I thought we lived in an age when studios took comic book-based movies seriously. Jonah Hex rewinds back to an era of Batman & Robin, Steel and Spawn. A clusterf**k of film that takes its comic-based property and pays superficial lip service to it, while seemingly showing a complete disregard for the fact that the script and direction were flushing the whole thing down the toilet. There hasn’t been a screw-up this bad since The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, and that film’s sins were compounded by the fact that it was Alan Moore’s legacy that it was pissing on. Even Halle Berry’s Catwoman has grace and subtlety by comparison.
But “grace and subtlety” aren’t part of the vocabulary of Jonah Hex. Neither is “cohesion”, “structure”. “humanity”, or “civility.” Granted this is a tale of the rough life in the Old West as seen through the eyes of notorious bounty hunter and ex-Confederate soldier Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), but the least they could do was edit the film in a way that made sense. At a scant 75 minutes, the makers of Hex seem content to say that the less you know the better. From what I saw, I can’t disagree with them.
From what I can understand, Hex was a Confederate soldier that had a disagreement with a friend and fellow soldier named Turnbull about certain war time actions never really exaggerated upon. Turnbull dies, but after the war his father comes calling on Hex for revenge. Extreme revenge. The type of revenge that leaves Hex the father of murdered children and the husband of a murdered wife. Left horribly scared by Turnbull and abandoned to die on his own, Hex lives thanks to some local natives and now has a supernatural gift to raise the dead and converse with them.
The whole thing about Hex being with the Sixth Sense is not in the comic book, which is more Searchers than Steampunk, another rogue element that has no part in Hex but is there just the same. And because the film leaves no cliché unturned, we get Megan Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold. That would fine, but sadly Fox gets no where near enough screen time to make oogling her worth the effort to sit through this mess. And what John Malkovich is doing here I’ll never know, because this is a man who will turn down playing the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, but will willing sign-up for this crud.
Only Brolin seems to realize what movie he’s in, playing the grizzled Hex with a John Wayne swagger and Clint Eastwood growl. Fortunately, Brolin also gets some room to build a semi-realized character, which could be a sign that the director was trying to do something interesting with the material before deciding that people were dumb and hate nuance. The screen is utterly filled with waste, whether its good actors like Will Arnett or Aiden Quinn being used for what’s basically Basil Expositions to the fact that every action scene seems to end with Hex blowing up a building.
I’m not sure where Jonah Hex went off the rails (so to speak), but I’d wager that it began with Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The authors of such Pulitzer worthy material like Crank, Crank 2 and Gamer penned the script, which was then handed off to Jimmy Hayward, whose past experience with directing is telling pixels which way move. His animating background (including work on several early Pixar hits) may serve him well with scene composition, but Hex could be taken as proof that no one from the Pixar School is an island onto themselves. Regardless of the filmmaking pedigree, I would thought it hard to believe that anyone could screw up a western comic this badly, but seeing truly is believing.
