Movie Review - 'Jonah Hex'

Jonah Hex Starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, and Megan Fox Directed by Jimmy Hayward Rated PG-13

A man gruesomely marked by the brand of the butcher who murdered his family believes his quest for revenge will come up empty when he learns his nemesis has died in a hotel fire. So what is left for this man? Where does he go? Jonah Hex is a comic book adaptation that, in a longer format, could actually dig deeper and try to answer some of those questions. Of course, the concern isn't about the frayed emotions of a man who has lost everything and is reminded by his half-paralyzed and grotesque face. Jonah Hex is about 'splosions. At least we get that much. For a movie this size - a large budget, big stars, and a big studio - Hex is criminally short. It runs less than 80 minutes, credits to credits, so that's not worth the ticket price. But why is it so short? It appears that director Jimmy Hayward has tried very hard to cut down the film to under an hour-and-a-half, and some of those experiments work. He flies through the early stages of the story with narration supplied by Hex (Josh Brolin), and that's always a sure sign that someone somewhere thought the movie needed to be shorter. Tipping its cap to the film's roots, Hayward, who also directed the very different Horton Hears a Who, bakes in an animated sequence to explain how Hex went from wearing the brand of Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) to learning about Turnbull's death years later. It's another device that seems out of place, although it might have been the most memorable sequence in the entire film. There's also the more subtle approach Hayward uses: Outside of fights, the scenes here are very short, the dialogue very direct and brief. Stylistic choice? There doesn't seem to be much style at all in the way the story unfolds, so this is probably just an incomplete script. Feels like it. Again, there's zero emotional turmoil once Hex gets branded. Even when he finds out Turnbull is really alive, which we know will lead to him exacting revenge at the end, it's an incredibly short change of color on the mood ring. The real curse of Jonah Hex is that well over half the film feels nondescript. Even though it's kind of a western on steroids set in the years immediately following the Civil War, only rarely does it evoke its period. It lacks an authenticity, which could be because it lacks so much of everything else. Some of the set pieces are nice enough, but there's not even any consistency between them. The Washington D.C. created for the end of the film smacks of rushed CGI, which is fine if the rest of the movie does, too. Otherwise, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Curiously enough, the three lead performances are adequate. Brolin, whose longest line of dialogue in Jonah Hex could fit on a coffee mug, still has a very convincing swagger. It would have been something to see what he could have done in this character's skin if the movie had been more about the man at the end of his quest for vengeance. But they certainly did cast this role correctly. John Malkovich, I maintain, is always better than a great script and always worse than a bad one, but I was wrong in this case. Here's a bad script and Malkovich isn't too far over the top, but he's menacing, devious, and everything else you'd expect a character like this to be. Megan Fox plays a prostitute. But a PG-13 one, however that works. Part of the reason the actors are able to hold up to inspection is that there is so little development of anyone in Jonah Hex, if the actors can get through six straight words of conversation, they've done their job. That's both the good and the bad news. Hex isn't necessarily as bad as you'll read. It's what I like to call a dogpile movie. Some critics can't wait to see it so they can unleash the good stuff, so they never give anything about the movie a fair shot. I remember seeing one of the Big Momma's House movies years ago and a critic who should have known better was secretly trying out his one-liners before the movie started, and some of them wound as zingers in his review. In this case, a gentleman named Willie Waffle writes, "The only people who deserve to see Jonah Hex are Hitler and the CEO of British Petroleum," and I'm not sure what that means. I know what the joke is, but I don't see the connection to the film. Is Jonah Hex some kind of unbelievable torture? No. It's just a slightly below average film that doesn't know what it wants to be. The irony of a dogpile movie is that critics commonly put as little thought into their exercise as the screenwriters whose work is so bad to begin with. None of this is to say that Hex is recommendable, but it's also not irredeemable. The animated sequence, a strange metaphysical showdown between Hex and Turnbull that is achingly similar to the end of Seraphim Falls from a couple years ago, and some of the steampunk-inspired weaponry are pretty interesting. But almost everything else flatlines.

Comments

[agburns]

Hey Colin,
Variety has the budget for Hex at a tiny $35 million. Probably does not include marketing, but that could explain bad CGI effects.

[Tjei]

This will make money anyways, especially abroad, especially in Eastern Europe, so why bother making a good film? In 00s US made enough heartless big budget blockbuster movies (although an average Ivan or Igor doesn't know what the hell that word is, he just knows it's something he gotta see, otherwise they'll say he's a village fool) and dumbed the audiences down just enough to effortlessly make crap now and still get the profit.

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