Cinema Verdict Review: Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex

OPENING: 06/18/2010

STUDIO: Warner Bros.

RUN TIME: 80 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Revenge gets ugly.

Opening Statement
Oh, man. Here I was, fairly certain that The A-Team was the low point of the summer movie season, and along comes Jonah Hex to blast my theory to hell.

Facts of the Case
Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin, No Country for Old Men) is a former confederate soldier turned bounty hunter. His never-ending supply of high-tech weaponry and his abilities to communicate with the dead give him a considerable advantage over the competition; anyone who challenges Hex isn’t likely to be alive very long. These days, Hex has revenge on his mind. His family was murdered by the evil Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, In the Line of Fire) years ago, and Hex has determined to go on a warpath of violence until Turnbull is dead. His mission is not only of personal importance, though. It seems that Turnbull has gotten his hands on a “nation-killing” device of sorts, and unless Hex can find him quickly, endless American lives are going to be lost.

The Evidence
That’s the basic narrative framework for Jonah Hex, an 82-minute disaster so bad that it just about has to be seen to be believed. How could things have gone this badly? I expect there’s an interesting story to be told about the trials and tribulations of putting this film together, as Jonah Hex appears to be the victim of terrible decision-making and brutal post-production tampering. There were reports of re-shoots, violence was cut out to get the rating down to PG-13, director changes, loads of script revisions, soundtrack issues and much more. Good films have occasionally been forged from troubled productions (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford comes to mind), but this is not one of those rare instances. Every problem is painfully evident on the screen, as the film serves less as a motion picture than as a reminder of just what can happen when a lot of second-guessing takes place.

The character of Jonah Hex was created for DC Comics in the 1970s as a reaction to the popularity of the sort of anti-hero western that made Clint Eastwood a star. Hex was essentially an Eastwood imitation; a quiet, gritty, mean fellow who had a tiny sliver of tenderness hiding beneath that rugged exterior. In recent years, the character has been thriving in an exceptionally involving and well-crafted comic book series written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, which delivers effectively bitter little western tales on a regular basis. Adapting any of their stories would have been a better choice than the one the filmmakers made, which was to add a bunch of new elements to the character and place him in a cinematic world that essentially attempts to fuse together elements of Wild Wild West, the James Bond franchise, Pushing Daisies and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

That may sound nifty on paper, but it leads to a disjointed experience that suffers from endless dramatic tonal shifts. One moment the film is an old-fashioned western, the next it’s an outlandish science fiction film. One moment the film is a gruff revenge thriller, the next it’s a jokey slice of camp. You get the idea. Why bother even adopting the Jonah Hex name-brand (he’s certainly not one of the more popular comic book characters) if you’re not even going to make a half-hearted attempt at staying true to what that character is all about? This would have been a forgivable sin if the film had offered something interesting on its own terms, but every “original” idea the filmmakers bring to the table belly flops. Some suggested upon seeing the trailer that Jonah Hex looked like another Wild Wild West. Regrettably, Jonah Hex makes Wild Wild West look like Casablanca.

The thing that makes Jonah Hex particularly frustrating is that it feels like once upon a time, there might have been a halfway-decent film sitting there in the editing room, just waiting to be pieced together. The whole thing has that suspicious “edited for television” feel, with climactic moments snipped out of action scenes and what appear to be the barely-recognizable remains of numerous subplots. For instance, the talented Michael Shannon is giving prominent billing, yet he’s only onscreen for about five seconds (and I only spotted him because I was looking for him). He’s onhand at an illegal fight between a big tough guy and a man who seems to have the ability to attack his opponents with snake venom. We don’t ever learn anything else about the snake guy, either. Stuff like that can be found everywhere. The soundtrack is an unholy mess, with heavy metal selections by Mastadon existing uncomfortably alongside various bits and pieces penned by Marco Beltrami and John Powell.

Truth be told, Josh Brolin is actually pretty good in the title role, convincingly grimacing his way through his scenes and delivering terse one-liners in an entertaining fashion. This is a character who deserves to headline his own movie, to be sure. It’s just that the film that surrounds Brolin is so aggressively bad; it just about kills any sense of goodwill his strong work brings to the proceedings. This is partially due to the fact that the action scenes have a tendency to drown him out (there are moments when you can barely hear what Brolin is saying because the music is cranked up so loud). Megan Fox isn’t onscreen much in her role as a prostitute with a soft spot for Hex, and she doesn’t do much of interest in the role. The supporting cast is quite impressive, and the movie astonishingly finds a way to waste everybody: Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn, Michael Fassbender, Lance Reddick, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Wes Bentley… not to mention the curiously absent Mr. Shannon.

Closing Statement
The film is so incompetent and misguided that one almost starts to pity it after a while in the same way that one might pity a wounded animal. It’s obvious that a lot of people were trying to make a movie that was cool and interesting once upon a time. Alas, after all the post-production drama, what’s left on the screen is nothing short of an atrocity.

The Verdict
1/10

• “”>