After it came and epically failed at the box office this summer, Jonah Hex was branded as a grade-A turkey, damning the goodwill Josh Brolin has earned over the past few years and further nailing the coffin of Megan Fox’s movie career. I started watching expecting a bad movie but upon it’s conclusion I wonder, did I actually watch a movie? Clocking in at a thankful, yet still puzzling 81 minutes with credits, Jonah Hex probably would have been a worse movie had it not been so hurried to its conclusion. For that we can be thankful I suppose.
From what I gather reading about the source comic series, the origin of Hex is similar but damn if we’d know it from the movie. Under the command of Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), Hex is a Confederate soldier who breaks rank after refusing to slaughter United States civilians and kills Turnbull’s son in the process. Hex is then forced to watch as his wife and son (I think?) are burned alive by Turnbull for revenge before being scarred and left for dead. Hex becomes a ruthless bounty hunter with a knack of speaking with the dead, Turnbull becomes a maniacal and fluffy-looking man who wants to destroy the United States, and Will Arnett plays some guy that I swear was going to break out dancing to The Final Countdown. Oh, and Megan Fox plays a prostitute.
Likely due to its impossibly short run-time, Jonah Hex feels nothing more than a story concocted of action pieces primarily with half-realized moments in between. The script by the absurdly named duo of Neveldine & Taylor does not wish to dwell upon the “boring” stuff like Hex being tormented over his family’s brutal killings or the oddly exposition-laced resurrection of the dead. Instead all the talky parts exist just to differentiate between which old-timey thug Hex is chucking an ax into or which town Turnbull is blowing up by some contraption called a “nation-killer.” Even the character of Turnbull is pretty interesting in theory as a Confederate general who is so incensed about the reunification of the country that he is willing to level towns or blow up trains with women and children to further his agenda. Again, all of this though is lightly glazed over in quick bits of dialog that are punctuated with explosions. Perhaps I should have watched Crank or Gamer to get a feel for what is to be expected from the screenwriters.
While my searches yielded no results, there has to be large chunks of this movie on the cutting-room floor as it makes as much sense to make a big budget summer movie that is less than an hour and a half as it does to give me $40 million to piss away. Brolin plays Hex decently although his performance here does not come close to some of his recent output (notably No Country For Old Men). While I posit it would be challenging to perform with half of your face covered in prosthesis, Brolin does it pretty effortlessly and does a good job selling a man with nothing to lose (even if the script did not help him much).
For all of his character’s intricacies, Malkovich is either bored or high on something as he looks villainous and acts villainous but there is no effort or even passion in his performance. Megan Fox is exactly how you would expect Megan Fox to be: nice to look at and borderline okay as an actor but totally superfluous in the story as the reluctant sidekick. Confusingly, some decent actors (Wes Bentley, Lance Reddick, Jeffery Dean Morgan, the aforementioned Arnett) pop up at random intervals to exist only as padding or exposition in a scene or two to be quickly forgotten. While there is technically an overarching story with Turnbull lashing out at the President and the United States, it is clear that a cohesive story was the last thing on the screenwriters’ and director Jimmy Hayworth’s mind. Neither was an authetic-ish western movie either as the score by Mastadon (yep, as in the band) was obnoxious and out of place as I typically do not connect horse riding and screeching guitars together.
Even if Jonah Hex was a competently made movie (it’s not), its brevity and large narrative holes would leave much to be desired. But again, based on what we had in that brief film, I shudder to think of what we did not see.
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