New Review: Jonah Hex

Shoot 'Em Out

I've spoken to great lengths to talk about my love for the revisionist Western. I do like it when filmmakers take a rather dusty genre and infuse it with a bit of a modern sense, whether it be characters that don't define the traditional lines of right and wrong or using a showcase of technology that isn't particularly accurate to the time period. I enjoy it when the Western can get a facelift every now and again. However, there's a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it. Jonah Hex represents the wrong way.

Based on one of the minor DC Comic characters, Jonah Hex, played by a stoic Josh Brolin, is a soldier in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. But his conscience leads him to betray his side and help the North. This leads his commanding officer Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) to kill his family, scar him and leave him for head. After a run-in with Indian medicine men, he is brought back to life with the ability to bring the dead back to life as well with a mere touch. He's recruited to help stop Turnbull from enacting a terrorist plot against the US as revenge for the South losing the war.

I admit that the beginning of the film kinda had me. When Hex unleashes his fury on a town attempting to catch his bounty, there's a fun, playful energy that go me excited to see what was to come. It was silly, but the best kind of silly. The action was engaging, and the whole thing saw its objective and took to it. Unfortunately, that's within the first ten minutes of the film, and it all goes down hill from there. Jimmy Hayward is the supposed director, but there's not much direction here. It's a mess of incoherent editing, harsh lighting that makes every scene hard to make out, and a script (by famed dou Neveldine and Taylor) that steals the exact same plot from Wild Wild West, and you know if I think this film is worse, then it must be bad.

Brolin is a capable actor, and he tries his best to work with the material. He does a able job, not one that elevates the material any but not one that overtly harms it. The ones that do harm it are Malkovich and Megan Fox, who plays the prostitute that Hex falls for. Malkovich is almost never very natural on-screen, and his stage persona comes across as overacting. Fox has zero chemistry with Brolin and he's a literal stick-figure of a character. Other supporting players ranging from Michael Fassbender to Wes Bentley to Will Arnett feel wasted in a film that gives these characters absolutely nothing to do.

At only eighty minutes, this film feels rushed. The scenes move frantically from one to another causing the film to be quite disorienting. At the same time, the pace also manages to slow down to a crawl in certain scenes, adding it up to a film that is quite unbearable. Despite a promise early on to deliver a silly yet fun action movie, the whole thing is a failure, crippled by a labored plot, subpar acting and breathless action. My praise for the revisionist Western might have reached Wild Wild West, but it can't reach one of the worst films of this year.

D+