Movie Review: ‘JONAH HEX’

With games like RED DEAD REDEMPTION out on game consoles, westerns seem to be the new black within the movie geek community. JONAH HEX seems properly timed, but is it any good?

JONAH HEX stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox and Michael Fassbender in a supernatural western yarn based on the DC Comics character. The character is not as well known as someone like Batman or Spider-Man but has been around for 30 plus years. Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is an antihero drifter who acts as a bounty hunter to get by. When word that his presumably dead enemy Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) is in fact still alive, Hex goes on the hunt to find and seek vengeance on Turnbull who murdered his family in retaliation for Hex betraying his squad and killing Quentin Turnbull’s son, Jeb – who happened to be Hex’s best friend. Lilah (Megan Fox), is Hex’s closest friend and slight love interest in the whole film. When Hex learns that Turnbull has acquired a Nation-killing weapon, Hex decides to do the right thing and stop him from executing Turnbull’s diabolical plan to destroy the nation – muhahahahaha.

The whole film is a mess. Whether the blame is to lie with director Jimmy Hayward, the CRANK screenwriting duo Neveldine/Taylor or Warner Brothers themselves, no one knows. The film has been plagued by re-shoots, the studio changing composers and forcing progressive-rock group Mastodon into creating a new outlook to the score the utilizes Mastodon-esque riffs as opposed to what Mastodon was originally wanting and agreed to do, to editing this film down to a measly 80 minutes – including the 5 minute (or more) animated introduction and the 8 minute credits. This thing definitely reeks of studio interference.

Honestly, I never read the comics, but I know that this character could have been pretty damn cool. Unfortunately, those efforts were not made. JONAH HEX results in a lifeless adaptation with Malkovich phoning in his performance and Megan Fox or her character shouldn’t have even been in the 15 minutes of this movie that she was in. While you will read the reviews that Fox is horrible in the film, I will say that it is an unfair judgment because, like I said, she was maybe in this film for 15 minutes, tops. It is obvious that her character was simply a gear in the device of the story that was horribly clunky.  Will Arnett is incredibly underused and will make you question why he is even in the film. Brolin is decent as our antihero and definitely fits in a western film. It’s a damn shame he wasn’t given a more powerful script. Watching this limp, but short, film made me wish that Neveldine and Taylor directed it. While I wasn’t a fan of GAMER, their previous film, I think they would have injected some adrenaline that this film needed.

While the end result is abysmal, if a director’s cut of this film hits the shelves with a substantial amount of footage added in, I would revisit it to see what was cut out as it is pretty apparent that this was meant to be an R-rated film but was hacked to pieces to fit the PG-13 summer blockbuster archetype.