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Review: Jonah Hex

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Genre: Action Comic Book
Directed by: Jimmy Hayward
Staring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett
Released: June 18th, 2010

THE GENERAL IDEA

Jonah Hex is a scarred drifter and bounty hunter of last resort, a tough and stoic gunslinger who can track down anyone… and anything. Having survived death, Jonah’s violent history is steeped in myth and legend, and has left him with one foot in the natural world and one on the “other side.” His only human connection is with Lila, whose life in a brothel has left her with scars of her own. Jonah’s past is about to catch up with him when the U.S. military makes him an offer he can’t refuse: in exchange for his freedom from the warrants on his head, he must track down and stop the dangerous terrorist Quentin Turnbull. But Turnbull, who is gathering an army and preparing to unleash Hell, is also Jonah’s oldest enemy and will stop at nothing until Jonah is dead.

THE GOOD

Josh Brolin NAILS Jonah Hex so well. His presence, personality, kickassery. All of it. He plays off the stoic and grouchy man on a mission perfectly. They couldn’t have asked for a better man to play this part. But one man won’t win the whole game for you. Its a team effort. This team should have been traded.

There is a lot of fluffy action and some one liners that make this movie fun at least in that aspect. For the popcorn quality of it, there are enough fisticuffs, gunfights and explosions to make you pay attention. But that’s all it has going for it aside from the perfect performance of Josh Brolin.

Oh, and the opening credits are actually pretty well done.

THE BAD

Ok… are you comfortable?

First off, every good adventure movie needs a good villain, and while the motives and actions of the villain are well thought out, John Malkovich is misserably terrible at portraying him. Yes, I get the reasons why he does what he does, and he honestly thinks he is doing the “right” thing in the processs, but never once is he an appealing personality or presence. In the end he is just the badguy and inconsequential. He is there because we need a badguy. Completely missed out opportunity with an actor who does know better.

Megan Fox was certainly eyecandy, but they could edit the movie without her in it and it would be no better or worse. She just didn’t matter. Her acting is about what we expect, and she does look like a whore. I just wish they didn’t involve her as the sidekick. Unneccessary.

And now I know that this is supposed to be an alternative western based on a comic book, so its not going to be traditional. But the comic played the supernatural IN the Wild West and didn’t screw around with the setting. They took the other stuff and brought it along with a traditional world and it worked. Having the high tech weaponry that simply did not exist back then (dynamite crossbow might as well have been a grenade launcher) distracted me, and the rock music was the steel toed boot that fully kicked me straight out of the setting. Dammit that made me think that it was pretty much a modern era movie that took place in a Civil War re-enactment fantasy camp (many of the extras were in fact re-enactment enthusiasts)

And the pacing of the movie is erratic. When its up, it bangs right through. But the buildups are just not there, and most of the impacting plot points just have no impact. Some things are left vague for later explaination – which if used should be used to some effect or big relveal but instead we just get a “oh, thats what that was” uneventful reveal.

Oh, and I might be wrong, but not once does anyone call him Jonah… its Jonah Hex. Every time.

The supernatural element was also unimportant. They could have ignored the whole “talk to dead people” thing completely and replace it with a living snitch and the plot is the same.

OVERALL

The light plot, wasted villain, The Fox Standard, disfunctional era setting, bad soundtrack, and one perfectly played hero.

If you turn your brain off for this, its still not that much fun. Not completely terrible, but for me it wasn’t worth the drive to the theater.

I give Jonah Hex a 4 out of 10 for brain-off popcorn stuff, Fox’s corset and mostly Brolin’s presence

http://weshijordan.blog.hexun.com/52044188_d.html

Jonah Hex (2010) [转贴 2010-06-19 17:37:33] [删除...]

Watch Jonah Hex Online centers on the so-called comic tome Confederate-turned-bounty hunter played by Josh Brolin, a man who's watched his folks burn by the side of the dispense of Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), a earlier Confederate army colonel-turned-terrorist. Vowing revenge on Turnbull, Hex begins working on behalf of the U.S. Martial, and in altercation on behalf of the capture of Turnbull he'll receive a jam-packed pardon. Of path, Hex accepts and the story doesn't grow much deeper than so as to.


Adapted from the comic tome chain of the same character, Hex has apparently been toned down from the highly graphic nature of the comic, though the PG-13 rating is taken scarcely approximately as far as it can grow as Hex leaves very a small amount of alive on his warpath to destroy Turnbull. However, even particular highly suggestive scenes from beforehand trailers tolerate been hack from this free indicating an unrated DVD/Blu-ray free is likely to take greater pro of Megan Fox, on stage the Civil War prostitute Lilah and perhaps everything as well the imaginative script likely had in it.

Maybe nearby was something to Jonah Hex ahead of Warner Bros. Stamped it on behalf of main part audience appeal. The flick was in black and white by R-rated script jockeys feature Neveldine and Brian Taylor who are top common on behalf of the brutal R-rated Crank grant, but nothing too exciting really happens in this item, which is bland by the side of top. Chopped down to approximately 80 particular minutes as soon as you take front and back-end credits into relation, along with a considerably slipshod animated sequence by the side of the opening in an attempt to promptness the story along, there's very little gone to grab carry of.

Since Hex, Josh Brolin is taxed with the attempt to create a meaningful character while saddled with a look toward prosthetic so as to limits his speech to gruff mumbles and a script so as to doesn't figure out him several extra string-pulling. I can no more than start to have lack of money was the sanity director Jimmy Hayward didn't turn on behalf of a jam-packed on young screen effect such as Aaron Eckhart's make-up in The Dark Knight, but what's existing at this point scarcely doesn't fit the bill.

Megan Fox adds little other than hot cleavage and a stain bustier to the proceedings though I wouldn't call it her fault. Her character is suddenly introduced and scarcely as quickly abandoned until a damsel in distress is basic to prolong the film's closing moments as Turnbull has gained possession of a Civil War-style mace of main part destruction approximately as ill-conceived as they occur. Tension is deficient and activity wanes as this film in no way grabbed me by the guts and demanded I reimburse attention.

My delicate enjoyment watching Michael Fassbender in pretty much no matter which can't be shared at this point. Playing Burke, Turnbull's oxymoronic Irish trivial leaden, Fassbender, along with each person as well working on behalf of Turnbull, is specified nix area to create a character other than to locate in front of Hex long a sufficient amount to give out. If you're paying a sufficient amount attention you'll likely notice Michael Shannon in a tiny, tiny, tiny role and desire Arnett even gets approximately five minutes of screen moment. Wes Bentley and shows up long a sufficient amount to offer the nastiest Southern accent I've heard in particular moment and, of path, I tolerate to allusion John Malkovich whose villainy is approximately as predictable as every of his evil one-liners.

Beyond the shallow acting and character development, CGI crows dominate the landscape whenever you like obvious young screen backgrounds don't. Perhaps Hayward is more by the side of at your house with films such as Horton Hears a Who (his no more than other item directorial outing), or the PG-13 rating caused this single to lose its bite and whimsy, or this was simply a troubled project from the start. Either way, little worked, as nearby was very little to labor with.

It's not so as to Jonah Hex is incredibly bad as much as it is needless and pour out in its current state. Much of the film feels like videogame hack screens and the combat is hushed by the side of top. You can mark down Jonah Hex as scarcely the most up-to-date exemplar of crummy movies setting out cold to fill the growing bore niche and offering little-to-nothing in its attempt.

http://geek-life.com/2010/06/18/movie-review-jonah-hex/

Movie Review: Jonah Hex
PostDateIcon June 18th, 2010 | PostAuthorIcon Author: Dan
Movie Review: Jonah Hex

I wish I could tell you that Jonah Hex was so bad it was good. That was what I was expecting going in. Instead, unfortunately, it’s just so bad it’s awful. I have no idea how they made this movie so unentertaining. Spell check tells me “unentertaining” is not a word, but it is now. Thank you Jonah Hex.

This is a movie about a cowboy with a horrible scarred face who can talk to dead people (Josh Brolin). It features John Malkovich as the main villain, Megan Fox in the role she was born to play (a prostitute), battles between ironclads, gatling guns strapped to a horse, and a crossbow that shoots dynamite. All of this sounds like it should make for lots of crazy fun, but all of it is wasted. Instead we have what would be the DC equivalent of Ghost Rider, except that this movie would be improved by Nicolas Cage.

The running time is only 80 minutes, which means there is time for absolutely nothing but the main plot and a couple of other inexplicable scenes. This is a very simple story. Our hero’s family is killed by the villain. The villain goes on to start blowing stuff up. The hero has to stop him and gain revenge. Yet this movie does not think we will understand this, and fills up way too much of its scant time with unnecessary flashbacks. Then stuff we do need explained (What is Hex’s relationship to Megan Fox’s character again? How does the bad guy’s random superweapon work?) is not.

Brolin’s role as Hex begs for ham, but he doesn’t really do anything special with it. Despite spending the entire movie in a skimpy bustier, Fox completely sucks the energy out of the proceedings whenever she appears. Malkovich, meanwhile, is a nonentity as former Confederate General Quentin Turnbull. Will Arnett for some inexplicable reason has a totally humor-free role as a military guy. Aidan Quinn appears as President Grant. Lance Reddick and Wes Bentley (who, yes, was also in Ghost Rider) have roles that could have been completely cut out and the movie would lose nothing, and yet the movie acts like we care about them. The best performance by far is Michael Fassbender as Turnbull’s lackey, a crazy Irish guy with face tattoos. He’s a refugee from a much better movie.

Perhaps the most unforgivable part of all is that this movie does not even take place in the Old West. Or at least I think it doesn’t. The geography is nonsensical. A few random scenes appear to be set in the West, such as the brothel where Fox’s character works. However, all the place names we hear are in Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia. The film was shot in Louisiana, and most of it appears very green and lush. And yet the old-west-looking places and the Deep South appear to be a short horse ride from each other. And then the climax is in Washington DC.

Turnbull has a complicated plot to destroy the United States on its Centennial in 1876, almost none of which is ever explained. This movie likes to blow things up for no discernible reason, so why not President Grant, I guess. Turnbull is repeatedly called a terrorist despite that word not really being in vogue at the time. He plans to use a superweapon designed by cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney to destroy Washington. Grant’s solution to this problem is to send Will Arnett to find this one melty face guy who Turnbull knew once, rather than sending, say, the army. From there the movie pretty much proceeds exactly as you’d expect it to, except that nothing is ever done well and nobody is having any fun.

At one point the directing team of Neveldine & Taylor, who gave us Crash and Gamer, were scheduled to helm. Both of those movies are raucous and entertaining and nothing else, and that spirit might have worked here. However, the film was taken away from them and given to Jimmy Hayward, whose only previous directing credit is for Horton Hears a Who. He is not the guy for this movie. All of the moments that should be really cool are edited into oblivion. I often lost track of what was going on in the action sequences, not because of shaky cam or anything like that, but simply through incompetent use of cutting and space by the director.

I’m going to end this with some spoilers for the ending, which is so ludicrous I can’t just leave it be. Hopefully this doesn’t matter because I went to this movie so you didn’t have to.

At the climax of the movie, Hex and Turnbull are having a fistfight in the boiler room of Turnbull’s ironclad (how he got an ironclad is never explained). This is intercut with Hex imagining having a fist-fight with Turnbull. The movie sets up that when you’re about to die, your mind “plays out your unfinished business”. Which might be fine except that Hex is finishing up his unfinished business in “reality” at the same time. So we get two badly edited fights between the same two characters at the same time for no good reason.

After Hex wins, he goes to the White House and is congratulated by the President. Grant gives Hex a star and says “America needs a sheriff.” Hex tells him “I don’t think countries have sheriffs” and gives it back. If I learned nothing else from this movie, it is that Ulysses S. Grant was the worst President ever.

http://detailedcriticisms.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-west-was-lost.html

June 18, 2010
How the West Was Lost!!
I have neither the energy nor the interest to write a full review of Jonah Hex, so, this'll be quick. Jonah Hex is not worth any of the hard earned cash that you will spend on it. I went in expecting a bad, but kick-ass action film. What I got was a really bad, boring as hell action film. The acting is terrible; Michael Fassbender is the only one having any fun in his role! The action is boring and uninspired. All the "DAMN" moments that these movies should have are nowhere to be seen! Bad special effects, really generic plotting, and the most anti-climatic finale in recent memory add up to make this one contemptible piece of work. If you are looking for fun, pointless action, The A-Team will suit far better than Jonah Hex. This is movie made in the wrong time. It belongs back in the 90s, when comic book movies sucked, rather then now, when they are awesome! It would have been right at home then.

Posted by Sebastian Gutierrez at 10:26 PM

http://www.colesmithey.com/capsules/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Jonah Hex

"Slipshod" doesn't begin to express the haphazard approach that its team of screenwriters and clueless director (Jimmy Hayward) take in making a pejoratively "cartoonish" movie. Most upsetting is the utter waste of estimable talents like Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Shannon, and Michael Fassbender. Rather than containing a cohesive storyline with developed characters, "Jonah Hex" is an abomination of disjointed apocryphal elements set during the Civil War. Brolin plays the title character, a Civil War soldier-turned-bounty-hunter who killed his best friend when said friend drew his pistol on Jonah for reasons that remain fuzzy--much like every other glossed-over detail. Said best friend was the brother of one hot-tempered Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich), who, in turn, burned down Jonah's farmhouse with his wife and son in it before branding his own initials in Jonah's right cheek for good measure. The gruesomely disfigured Jonah--he since burned away the initials with an axe blade--is now able to communicate with the dead. As such, Jonah is the only man General Grant (Aiden Quinn) can turn to bring down the nefarious Turnbull, who is not as deceased as previously believed. It seems QT has wrangled up some funky pre-industrial-revolution weapons of mass destruction with which he plans to divide and conquer the nation. Megan Fox is the coldly sexual prostitute Lilah who helps Jonah get his courage up when she isn't getting in dust-ups with less mannered, but more attractive, clientele. There isn't a single reason to see this movie.

Rated PG-13. 81 mins. (D-) (Zero Stars - out of five/no halves)

http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2010/06/jonah-hex-2010/

Jonah Hex (2010)

By Steve Biodrowski • June 18, 2010

Jonah Hex (2010)JONAH HEX may not turn out to be the worst blockbuster that Hollywood inflicts upon us this summer, but it certainly seems likely to be the most disappointing. Not disappointing because it was filled with potential, but disappointing because it fails to deliver even the cheap thrills, over-hyped action heroics, and pre-fabricated melodrama that – at a bare minimum – passes for entertainment in this kind of film. This is one, dull ride across the range that will have viewers running home in search of HIGH-PLAINS DRIFTER, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY, and even THE CROW – just as a reminder that there is a way to do this kind of genre piece right.

The film starts with a clever opening cue – the Warner Brothers theme played on electric slide guitar, lending a Western feel to the familiar notes – but with a modern edge. This echo of Ennio Morricone (who scored Sergio Leone’s great Italian Westerns) is the first and last time we will feel any sense of anticipation in JONAH HEX, because anticipation requires a narrative confidence that this film utterly lacks. The pacing is weirdly schizophrenic – a fact that becomes evident in the opening prologue.

The first problem is that the prologue should not even exist. Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) should be introduced as a man of mystery, but the film seems afraid of letting us figure out his back story along the way, so instead it is spelled out in an opening montage, with helpful voice over from the character.
Jonah Hex

Turnbull (John Malkovich) torches Jonah's home.

Unfortunately, the sequence is oddly truncated, as if the filmmakers were even more afraid that we might be bummed out if Hex’s personal tragedy were actually allowed to register on an emotional level. So what we get is the telegraph version: Hex family killed stop Hex face branded stop Hex recovers from near death stop Hex now able to communicate with dead stop Hex becomes bounty hunter full stop. Consequently, the scene leaves us cold, and later flashbacks, filling in the missing details, comes a bit late to hit us with emotional impact – it’s a re-run of what we already know, and it’s too late to make us care.

If this opening miscalculation were just a matter of the film getting off to a shaky start, we could try to forget it and move on, but the sequence turns out to be symptomatic of the rest of JONAH HEX, which feels like an all-out assault on narrative coherency. It’s as if Nicolas Roeg got stuck with a boring work-for-hire assignment and decided to sabotage the production with his patented fee-association montage approach.

Or more likely, the film feels eerily reminiscent of THE INVASION (2007), the adaptation of Jack Finny’s The Body Snatchers that the Warner Brothers studio turned over to the Wachowski Brothers in post-production. JONA HEX features the same sort of editorial trickery, with different scenes intercut in a way that confuses the timeline in the hope of compressing exposition and visuals into one big – though not very finely threaded – knot.
TWO FILMS IN ONE
Jonah Hex

In a plot devil reminiscent of PUSHING DAISIES, Jonah Hex briefly revives the dead to get information

JONAH HEX is supposed to be two films in one: it’s a Western about a bounty hunter out for revenge, and it’s a horror- fantasy about a man who stopped just short of death’s door and now has some kind of connection with those on the other side, manifested in the ability to briefly resurrect the dead for interrogation purposes. But more than that JONAH HEX feels like a movie that was shot twice, and the editors could not decide which pieces to use, so they intercut both of them. JONAH HEX Take One was apparently about a loner cowboy whose only companions were a horse and a dog, and it ended with Hex and his enemy Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) duking it out in the desert. JONAH HEX Take Two gives Hex a sometimes girlfriend, a hooker with a heart of gold named Lilah (Megan Fox) and ends with Hex and Turbull duking it out aboard an iron-clad vessel.

The two fight-to-the-death scenes with Hex and Turnbull are intercut, the justification (provided in voice over) being that the desert sequence is a near-death hallucination, to which Jonah is flashing back. As if that two-fer were not enough, there is also a double ending: in one, Jonah and Lilah walk away together, into a beautifully rendered cloudy blue sky; in the other, Jonah rides off into the desert, with his horse and dog, but without Lilah.

It is weirdly symptomatic of JONAH HEX’s mangled macho ethos that the scene with the dog – in fact Jonah’s relationship with the animal – is far more moving than the one with Lilah. In fact, the dog’s has a few good moments that leave us wanting more. The canine is introduced as if it will feature prominently: Hex evens the odds with some idiots who are tormenting the creature, which shows its gratitude by following him of its own accord. And then…nothing. The poor pup’s apparently abbreviated role suggests one of those old time co-stars whose best scenes were cut out to salvage the vanity of the headliner afraid of being upstaged.

Whether JONAH HEX was in fact largely reshot and recut, I cannot say, but I certainly hope it was – because I would hate to think that the film was designed from the ground up to be this way. For all the talk of CLASH OF THE TITANS being radically revised at the last minute, the seams that show are relatively forgivable. In JONAH HEX, however, the film feels stitched together like a bad mad scientist’s experiment.

For one thing, Fox’s character looks shoe-horned into the film at random intervals. At one point she kills a paying customer; the next time we see her, it’s as if the incident never happened. (Sure, we know the creep deserved it, but are we really supposed to believe the local sheriff, not to mention the guys’ family, would just give her a pass?) She’s a kick-ass girl except when the script needs her to be easily abducted by Burke (Michael Fassbender) so that Turnbull can use her as bait to lure Jonah Hex into a trap.

Weirdly, Turnbull doesn’t follow up on this plan; instead, Hex shows up of his own accord, leading to an unintentionally hilarious bit. Turnbull, who has been delivering his standard-issue evil-villain-victory-speech to his men on the deck of his iron-clad ship, suddenly produces Lilah out of nowhere, like a poker player revealing an ace up his sleeve. What the… did he have her hidden in his overcoat, or what? (And by the way, how did Burke know that Jonah loved Lilah? Should we even care, when the screenwriters plainly don’t?)

In time honored tradition of movie villains, Turbull doesn’t kill Jonah when he has the chance (even though he has ordered Hex’s death in the past). No, in a hilarious piece of lip-service screenwriting, Turnbull says he wants Hex to see his moment of triumph – and then locks up Hex and Lilah below decks, from which vantage point, Turbull’s triumph will not be visible (although it will of course, give Hex and Lilah ample opportunity to escape).

Jonah Hex (2010)jonah hex ironclad

This leads to a lengthy but not particularly exciting climax filled with enough idiocy to make you wonder whether JONAH HEX isn’t some kind of extremely well-disguised self-parody. The U.S. government sends a boat to intercept Turnbull, but in a plot development that sounds like something out of THE WILD, WILD WEST, Turnbull is in possession of a super secret sci-fi type weapon. Said weapon was designed for but never built by the government; the U.S. government knows he has it and has seen the destruction it has wrought, but the U.S. officers sent to intercept him basically shrug when he opens fire, and simply wait to be obliterated.

This leaves it up to Jonah and Lilah to save the day. Fortunately, the “nation-killer” weapon has been deliberately designed with a feature that gives the heroes time to stop it. For reasons that would occur only to a screenwriter, the multi-barrel cannon fires off half a dozen rounds that land harmlessly, until a final “trigger” round is fired – and of course, the trigger takes a long time to roll down the conveyor belt before being loaded. This is every bit as silly as it sounds.

This indifferent approach to even the semblance of continuity and common sense perfectly encapsulate the narrative strategy of JONAH HEX. It’s as if the filmmaker thought up some random scenes they wanted to see and simply stitched them altogether for their own – certainly not our – enjoyment.
WHO CARES ABOUT STORY? WHAT ABOUT ACTION?

Jonah HexPresumably no one is sidling up to JONAH HEX hoping to enjoy a sophisticated story. But the film fails to deliver even the basic popcorn entertainment. Jimmy Hayward cannot direct action. The big set-pieces just lie there. He is equally unable to capture that Sergio Leone feel of the calm before the storm, the delicious anticipation of violence, when the hero will finally deliver the payback so richly deserved.

Hayward doesn’t know how to modulate his effects to suit the ups and downs of the story; sure, his cinematographer captures some great outdoor scenery, but it’s never used to set a tone or establish a mood that will underline the drama. JONAH HEX feels shot-by-numbers, but Hayward seems to have used the same numbers over and over. For instance, footage of Hex riding across the open range exhibits a generic quality, as if it were all shot on a single day and intercut at random throughout the film. Whether Jonah is heading to meet Lilah or to track down Turnbull, he always rides at the same pace, and with the same expression.

In a desperate effort to enliven this leaden lack of exciting gunplay, Marco Beltrami’s dramatic score is intermixed with metaloid music by Mastadon. More and more we’re hearing this type of aural assault used to hype trailers (e.g., THE WOLF MAN), but this is one of the first times it has crept into the actual film, which should have stuck closer to the Morricone template.
WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE?

jonah hex photo20 300x126 Jonah Hex (2010)Josh Brolin certainly looks the part of Jonah Hex. He gets off a good line here or there, responding to the oft-asked question, “What happened to your face?” And his awkward response to the unexpected loyalty of the dog he rescued (”I don’t know what to say to you”) is endearing. Unfortunately, the voice over robs him of the mystery that such a character should maintain; we should read his pain buried somewhere deep behind his eyes, not hear it spoken to us directly. And the makeup doesn’t work as well as it should. Not that it looks bad, but it never becomes a part of the performance the way that, for example, Heath Ledger made use of the Joker’s scarred mouth.

Malkovich is too good to phone it in, but this is as close as I ever want to see him get. The script’s one moderately interesting idea is making Turbull the 19th century equivalent of a terrorist (the word doesn’t even exist in English, forcing President Grant [a very sincere Aidan Quinn] to resort to a Spansish coinage adopted by Turnbull’s Mexican comrades). But Turnbull is under-motivated. He hates the North, but it’s not clear that he really wants to help the South (in one of those obligatory movie-villain scenes, he kills an ally for no other reason than to remind us that he is the villain). And Malkovich doesn’t bother trying to find anything underneath the man’s skin that will make him anything more than the cardboard character that the script has given him.

Jonah HexIn a development so unexpected it almost makes JONAH HEX worth seeing, Malkovich is overshadowed (even if only briefly) by Fox, who manages to show one decent glimmer of human warmth in a scene with Jonah, letting us know she really loves him (unlike her other clients). It’s almost enough to make you expect something interesting from her character, before she descends to being plot device. (Note to director Hayward: If you’re going to put Fox into that corset, you might as well try to generate a little heat with her character instead of presenting her with all the appeal of a barely noticed fashion accessory.)

The real scene-stealer is Michael Fassbender, as the crazy Irish, violence-loving henchmen to Turnbull. As much as we’re supposed to hate him for being a homicidal thrill killer, his joy de guerre is the film’s bright spot. You wonder if the filmmakers feel the same way, because they are absolutely unable to wring any satisfaction out of his death scene, which plays almost like something that was edited for television.
PROUD TO BE A REBEL – BUT WHAT IS YOUR CAUSE?

Jonah HexAs scrambled as the narrative of JONAH HEX is, even more scrambled is the underlying attitude toward the character. Hex fought for the South, and turned against his comrades only when his commanding officer (Turnbull) ordered attacks on civilian targets, including a hospital. This led to a fatal shoot-out with Turnbull’s son, Jeb (an uncredited Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who has one of the best moments when Hex briefly resurrects him to get information on father Turnbull’s whereabouts). Jonah Hex’s change-of-heart regarding the righteousness of the war he was fighting could have been a powerful sequence; alas, it is not shown. It is simply referenced to allow Hex off the hook for fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War, without coming to terms with what the fight was about.

In case this sounds like over-interpretation, the closing credit crawl for JONAH HEX ends with a folk song whose chorus proclaims the singer is proud to be a rebel who fought the Union; he’s sorry only about losing. Is the singer speaking for Jonah Hex? If not, why put the song in at all, especially at the very end, when most viewers will have left the theatre? Is this a shout-out to anyone with lingering resentments over the Civil War?
Jonah Hex

See? This proves the film is not endorsing racism.

Lest we conclude that JONAH HEX is endorsing racist sentiments, the filmmakers includes an official Hollywood disclaimer in the form of the token black man from whom Hex purchases weapons. In case the mere presence of this character were not enough to absolve Hex, our token character delivers dialogue insisting that Hex wasn’t for slavery and wasn’t for sessesion; he just didn’t like the government telling him what to do. This makes no sense (after all, the South had a government that told Hex to put on a uniform and fight the North). It’s just an embarrassing form of pandering to the tea-baggers in the audience: Sure I’m sorry the South lost the war that abolished slavery, and now that a black man is in the oval office, I’d like to secede, but that doesn’t mean I’m racist.

Once again, liberal Hollywood turns out not to be so liberal.

JONAH HEX (June 18, 2010). Directed by Jimmy Hayward, Screenplay by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor; story by William Farmer and Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, based on the DC Comics character by John Albano and Tony Dezuniga. Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnet, John Gallagher Jr., Tom Wopat, Michael Shannon, Wes Bentley, Julia Jones, Luke James Fleischmann, Rio Hackford, Aidan Quinn.

http://deadderrickreviews.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex-2010.html

Friday, June 18, 2010
JONAH HEX (2010)

JONAH HEX is a film that I had been hearing about for years, much like the upcoming PRIEST film. Like the upcoming film PRIEST it is a horror-themed superhero movie. Unfortunately, being the result of far too much tinkering in the studio and edits, JONAH HEX is a terrible movie. It's probably the worst horror themed superhero movie that I've ever seen. It's worse than SPAWN or GHOST RIDER!

The sad thing is the film actually gets off to a good, solid start and set me up for a fun ride through a Western/Superhero/Supernatural film. Unfortunately, the beginning is one of the only three things I can praise about this film and it lasts less than 5 minutes. We immediately jump into some poorly animated comic panels that explain Jonah Hex's history and why he is the way he is. You didn't have enough money to film the actual scenes.
The plot actually revolves around Jonah Hex, whose family is killed right in front of his face by the villain of the movie and is horribly scarred. It turns out that the government needs Jonah Hex to save them all from Quentin Turnbull (played by John Malkovich who is really slumming it in this role). Speaking of slumming it, Josh Brolin is pretty bad in this movie and Megan Fox is nearly unwatchable (in the 4 or 5 scenes of the movie that she actually appears in). Will Arnett (a hilarious comedic actor) and Wes Bentley (who actually did a good job in DOLAN'S CADILLAC earlier this year) are both extremely awkward in their scenes and seem miscast!

The only person who seems to be pulling off a decent job is Michael Fassbender (from EDEN LAKE, BLOOD CREEK, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, and 300) who actually is entertaining as a tattooed henchman who is second in command. The three main things I can praise this movie on are having a good start until that crappy flash animation showed up, Megan Fox only being in 4-5 scenes and the actual movie clocking in at under 80 minutes (though it feels much, much longer).

Grade: D-: Seriously, this movie is a flaming piece of crap. It sucks horribly. Nearly everything is wrong about this movie. It really sucks for the fans who have been waiting forever for this film to be disappointed in the long run. This is not only one of the worst comic adaptations I have witnessed on screen, but it's also one of the worst superhero movies ever made. It gives BATMAN AND ROBIN a run for it's money for crying out loud! Avoid it! This is easily the worst movie I have sat through in a theater thus far this year!

Posted by Dead Derrick at 4:34 PM

http://www.scifisquad.com/2010/06/18/jonah-hex-review/

Review: Jonah Hex

06.18.10 By: Brad Trechak

Bagging an early showing of an upcoming movie has its perks. For one thing, it's possible to write about it on opening day. However, it has its downsides, such as when the movie is somewhat crap. If I had to put it in a DC Comics movie quality category, Jonah Hex probably goes somewhere around the level of Constantine, but not quite as good.

Jimmy Hayward's film is short at 81 minutes, which is probably a good thing considering the plot is unfocused and has holes that are a mile wide and a fathom deep. The best thing about it is Josh Brolin-- and it isn't even his best performance (he was much better in W.). Llikely, Jonah Hex would have been better if it was more a parody of the clichés of Western movies (like Unforgiven, but campier), but it seemed to take itself way too seriously. Spoilers begin after the jump.

One of the problems of Jonah Hex is that it doesn't quite fit a category. It's a steampunk Western like Wild Wild West but with horror movie elements. Hex now has the ability to speak to the dead provided he makes physical contact with the carcass. John Malkovich plays a southern plantation owner, Quentin Turnbull, who is a little peeved that Hex killed his son in the Civil War and that his side lost, so he has decided to overthrow the United States government. In the biggest example of typecasting in the movie, Megan Fox plays a prostitute. Insert joke here.

Two nice surprises for entertainment buffs are a rare dramatic role for Will Arnett (Arrested Development) as an army Lieutenant and an appearance by Tom "Luke Duke" Wopat. Michael Fassbender chews the scenery as Burke, the psychotic Irish terrorist and the closest thing the movie has to The Joker.

I recognize that the target audience of Warner Brothers' sole 'superhero' film of the summer is pre-teen and early-teen males, but the odds are that none of them have ever heard of the Jonah Hex comics (or even comic books in general). The only way they'll see Jonah Hex this coming weekend is if Toy Story 3 is sold out.

Even the steampunk technology isn't really properly explained. The bad guys' major weapon (stolen from the good guys, of course) is a long-range cannon capable of delivering a payload that is something like a small-scale nuclear bomb. Huh? Even the giant spiders of Wild Wild West weren't quite this far-fetched.

Jonah himself is an anti-hero who slaughters as many people as he saves (a point brought up in the dialogue) and is more motivated by revenge against Turnbull (who kills his family and brands his face. Hex scars himself to remove the brand) than by any sense of justice. He does exhibit a little more decency than the people he is shooting, but only a little. The closest Marvel character equivalent would be The Punisher. Actually, The Punisher is also probably the Marvel franchise that is the closest analog for Jonah Hex. If that is the case, we'll probably see a direct-to-DVD sequel in a few years with someone else playing the title character.

There are some fun elements to Jonah Hex, but overall it's a wasted opportunity to bring more of DC's obscure characters to the mainstream. It's a film that was done poorly from the script level even if the actors give some good performances (even Megan Fox shone for a moment or two). If you're going to watch it, wait until it's on cable TV in three months or so. Go see Toy Story 3 instead.

http://jezebel.com/5567299/jonah-hex--an-incoherent-crapfest

Jonah Hex: An Incoherent "Crapfest"

Jonah Hex: An Incoherent "Crapfest"While Warner Bros. is hoping a corseted Megan Fox can lure teenage boys into seeing Jonah Hex, several critics suggest everyone was drunk and/or high while making the film, and say it "fails to establish a viable reason to exist."

Though it doesn't appear that director Jimmy Hayward paid much attention to the plot, the film is about Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), a 19th-century bounty hunter/drifter looking for revenge against Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), a former Confederate officer who murdered Hex's family after he accidentally killed Turnbull's son. The incident left Hex with a gaping hole in his cheek that leaks whiskey when he drinks, and the ability to reanimate the dead for short periods of time. (The A.V. Club explains, "like Lee Pace in Pushing Daisies, but without the pies.") Years later, Turnbull has become an anti-government terrorist, and President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) asks Hex to stop him. Hex's prostitute girlfriend Lilah (Megan Fox) helps by frolicking about the Western town of Stunk Crick in a skimpy gown and thigh highs. (Later the setting changes to Washington, D.C., though there's no explanation of how the characters get there.)

Reviewers say Jonah Hex is "what happens when someone promises to deliver a releasable movie by a certain date, and then doesn't." It runs only 81 minutes, including lengthy opening credits, yet seems to drag on forever due to horrible editing and "witless dialogue." Josh Brolin is tolerable, but the rest of the cast, including Aidan Quinn, Will Arnett, and The Wire's Lance Reddick, are wasted. Megan Fox's character only shows up for 15 minute and she gives, "a performance so inert she seems carved out of wax." Oddly enough, The New York Times is one of the only papers that had something nice to say, noting, "There's also a horse and an excellent dog with which Mr. Brolin has terrific chemistry."

Below, the reviews:

Entertainment Weekly

Brolin discharges his comic-book duties manfully (if by manful you mean with a perpetual, squint, growl, scar-tissued sneer, and a tendency to peer out below the brim of his hat like a cowboy Princess Di). But the star is done in by the deathless mediocrity of the production, an assemblage of random camera shots, messy editing, redundant scenes, and witless dialogue as haphazardly stitched together as the flesh on Jonah Hex's face.

Rolling Stone

It must have been hard labor for Josh Brolin to get in the makeup chair for hours to capture the disfigured look of DC Comics anti-hero Jonah Hex. Due respect to the talented Brolin, it's much harder to sit in a theater and watch this crapfest. Director Jimmy Hayward fails to establish a viable reason for this movie to exist.

The A.V. Club

"...Every once in a while, a film limps into theaters so stitched together, it's a wonder it doesn't rip apart in the projector. Jonah Hex is such a film....

Rumors of trouble dogged Jonah Hex's production from the time its original directors, the Crank writing-directing team of Neveldine & Taylor, abandoned the project, up to when director Jimmy Hayward-an animation vet making his live-action debut-conducted last-minute reshoots with another director's help. Trouble happens, of course, but the 81 minutes (including credits) of Jonah Hex footage that made it to the screen look like something assembled under a tight deadline, and possibly under the influence. One flashback makes three appearances. A fight scene with no dreamlike elements, apart from a sky tinted red in post-production, repeatedly appears as a dream sequence. A chunk of Hex's origin is told by way of animation for no apparent reason. Narration comes and goes. Whole elements, like Hex's supernatural powers and Megan Fox's prostitute-in-distress, could disappear without anyone noticing. And that's without even mentioning the Native American village that shows up at random. Or the CGI crows. Or the acid-spitting snake-man. (One element that occasionally gives the illusion of coherence: a neat spaghetti-metal score. But even that was cobbled together from separate work by Marco Beltrami and Mastodon.) Jonah Hex is what happens when someone promises to deliver a releasable movie by a certain date, and then doesn't.

USA Today

The opening frame of Jonah Hex should say: "Caution: Made expressly for the male teen demographic. Not suitable for anyone of any age who prefers movies with coherence, an original plot or characters they give a hoot about."

Jonah drifts, dabbles in bounty hunting and sidles up to Lilah, a comely prostitute played by Megan Fox in a performance so inert she seems carved out of wax.

New York Daily News

Hayward and screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor toss in anything they think might look cool (modern weaponry, supernatural scares), and throw out anything that gets in the way (plot, characterization, logic). And though Brolin is always watchable, all the actors appear well aware that they're slumming. If all you want is a bullets-and-bombs B-movie, you'll get your money's worth: Somehow, Hayward makes 82 minutes feel like hours.

Hollywood Reporter

Clocking in at a barely there 81 minutes (and that includes the extensive credits sequence), the pared-down end product plays like a generous highlights reel with little else remaining to thread together those explosive, CG-riddled action sequences.

Originally slated for an early August bow, the Warner Bros. release was bumped up to serve as young male-skewing counterprogramming to Toy Story 3, but despite some entertaining bits and pieces, the overall picture unlikely will live up to fanboy Hex-pectations.

The Los Angeles Times

Malkovich, who does malevolence so well, is strangely flat as the villain. All would be lost without his No. 2, the devilish Michael Fassbender as a tattooed crazy Brit named Burke. He takes care of most of the hand-to-hand combat with Jonah and brings the fire needed to fuel the bad guys and inflame his adversaries.

The New York Times

Though it has bad word of mouth, Jonah Hex is generally better, sprier and more diverting than most of the action flicks now playing, The A-Team included. The director of Hex Jimmy Hayward, whose first feature was the animated children's movie Horton Hears a Who!, isn't Sergio Leone, but he maintains a lightness of touch throughout, a welcome change from the lugubriousness that tends to weigh down so many big-screen adaptations of comic books. The cast is weird and slightly confusing - Aidan Quinn, Will Arnett and a very good Michael Fassbender - if solid. As the requisite hooker, Megan Fox has about 15 minutes of screen time, but she fills out the Victorian hooker clothes that make the most of her swelling, perspiring bosom. There's also a horse and an excellent dog with which Mr. Brolin has terrific chemistry.

The Boston Globe

Now "the very fate of our nation rests with Jonah Hex.'' He has supernatural powers (he talks to the dead; thanks, Crow Indians!) and lies in bed with Megan Fox, who's been cast and clothed, so imaginatively, as a wild-west prostitute. She damsels too easily. In her close-ups, Fox appears to be staring out from a music box or a department store window. If she won't be returning to Transformers and she's looking for a new recycled franchise, might I suggest "Mannequin?''

The movie's desperate, mangled assembly does produce an unexpected side effect. The general incoherence is almost druggy (one of the production companies is Weed Pictures). From Warner Bros.' standpoint, this seems apt. If the studio thinks this is its next Batman,' it might be high.

The Chicago Tribune

Here's how you know Josh Brolin has become a movie star: Jonah Hex may not be much with him, but without him? Perish the thought. Perish it, throw an ax in its heart, then burn it to a crisp.

Brolin is not exactly being challenged here, but he is a very droll fellow, and without his taciturn delivery of some rudimentary zingers, typically delivered after throwing an ax into someone's heart, you'd be stuck wondering what's up with John Malkovich's amusing attempt at a Southern dialect. Or wondering how this short (about 80 minutes minus credits), sour and absurdly violent picture got by with a PG-13 rating. Did the ratings board members all have jury duty the day of the screening?

The Chicago Sun-Times

The presence of Lilah in the film is easily explained: She is played by Megan Fox. If you want a woman in an old western town, there are only three occupations open to her, hooking, schoolmarming, and anyone called Ma.

After Hex saves the day, he's invited into the Oval Office, thanked, and then presented with a big badge. What is this badge? The president tells Hex: "America needs a sheriff." This provided the audience with a big laugh, which sounded like it might have been botched up for awhile.

"Jonah Hex" opens today nationwide.

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/review-jonah-hex.php

Review: Jonah Hex

Posted by Rob Hunter (rob@filmschoolrejects.com) on June 18, 2010 Share

If you’re the type of person whose favorite part of the theater-going experience is the trailers that play before the features, this weekend holds a special treat for you. Head down to your local cineplex, buy a ticket for Splice or Get Him To the Greek, and then sneak into a showing of Jonah Hex. At under eighty minutes it’s a little long for a traditional trailer, and of course it gives away too much of the ending, but the brief hints of big action, effects, and fun will really get you excited for when the actual movie is released.

Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is an ex-Confederate soldier who refused a morally dubious order from his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), and then paid for it by being forced to watch his wife and son die before his eyes. As a parting gift Turnbull brands Hex’s cheek with a ‘QT’ and leaves him alive to wallow in his misery. But Hex is no wallower. Some passing Indians with nothing better to do with their time bring him back from the brink of death and unintentionally imbue him with the ability to speak to the dead. He turns lemons into lemonade by fixing the facial burn so that it resembles the aftermath of a horrible string-cheese disaster, and then transforms himself into a bounty hunter par excellence. His chance at direct vengeance dies with Turnbull in a hotel fire, but Hex continues to express his frustration by hunting for other baddies just the same.

We know all this because a s$#!-ton of expository narration, some middle-school quality animation, and a handful of jumbled together footage tell us so.

Hex finds solace in the plasticine arms of Lilah (Megan Fox), the hooker with a heart of gold and perfect teeth who can handle herself in a fight even though she weighs seventy-five pounds soaking wet which by the way she never gets in this movie until the very end but stays underwater so we can’t enjoy it, until the US government comes calling to recruit his help in their losing battle against a homegrown terrorist named… wait for it… Quentin Turnbull! He’s alive! He’s blowing the hell out of hospitals, schools, churches, and passenger trains in a bid to destabilize the government and the nation. According to President Aidan Quinn (Aidan Quinn) the only man who can stop him is Jonah Spaghetti-Face Hex. And thus begins several minutes of action and adventure filled with explosions, gun fights, blink and you’ll miss it appearances from actors who should know better, shoddy CGI, and a second intervention by those meddling Indians who insist on resurrecting every half-dead white man they stumble across.

If you’re getting the impression that Jonah Hex is not a good movie it’s because Jonah Hex is not a good movie. Production troubles were reported almost from the beginning when screenwriters Neveldine/Taylor, the duo behind the ridiculous Crank films, had their double-wide director’s chair filled with someone else. That someone was Horton Hears A Who helmer Jimmy Hayward, and Jonah Hex was his first live-action feature. On-set confusion, re-shoots, ratings squabbles, and an editing session courtesy of Edward Scissorhands followed, but we’re here to review the film not the gossip. So let’s begin with what the movie gets right…

Brolin has some fun with the Hex character, and he actually earns some chuckles with his delivery of several humorous lines. Some of the action and fight scenes are fun to watch. Fox is purty.

So there’s that.

The list of what the film gets wrong is far longer, but honestly I don’t feel the need to go through it all. The gist of it is probably evident throughout this review, but the bottom line is that the movie is a mess. Brolin and Fox are fine performance-wise, but both suffer some unfortunate visual deformities. Hex’s facial effects just don’t convince… it looks like someone took Silly Putty, made an imprint of a Cathy cartoon strip, then slapped the whole thing on Brolin’s face. And Fox is a beautiful woman, but every close-up shot has seemingly been touched-up beyond human recognition. Characters aren’t given time to grow. There’s no sense of geography or time. Major events like gaining and using the ability to talk to the dead are glossed over. Narration is poorly written and even more poorly placed. I could go on, but I’d rather go grab lunch so I’ll stop here.

One disappointment resulting from the hatchet editing job does deserve mention though, and it’s the glimpses of actors and characters that could have been… Will Arnett gets a few minutes to walk around and act incredulous, Michael Shannon has literally thirty seconds to snarl some introductions as ringmaster at a cage match, Aidan Quinn has barely a few short scenes (and I would wager he was completely unaware of what was happening in any scene outside of his own), and I’m pretty sure Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows up at one point too. There’s also a brief detour into an illicit cage match featuring some kind of snake-man whose jaw unhinges and drools venomous saliva… clearly a foe who should have gone head to head with our hero, but instead he disappears never to return.

At barely eighty minutes with credits, I’d have a hard time recommending Jonah Hex be seen in theaters even if it was a good movie. Which it’s not. So this is an easy call… add this one to your Netflix queue and wait for the DVD that’s bound to feature roughly thirty minutes of deleted scenes. Or, as I recommended above, pay for a good movie you’ve already seen and sneak into Jonah Hex to watch this fizzle reel for free.

The Upside: Some mildly successful humor; solid fight scenes and massive explosions; very high body count

The Downside: Severe lack of character depth; messy voice-over narration; obvious gaps in narrative; inconsistent effects; odd CGI “smoothing” effect on Megan Fox’s face

On the Side: I actually like Megan Fox and have never understood the pure vitriol spewed her direction on a daily basis. But she is in serious need of a new agent.

Grade: C-

http://wispenaut.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex-review.html

Friday, June 18, 2010
Jonah Hex -- Review
Recently has been a frenzy over adaptations and this summer is one full of a wide variety ranging from comic, graphic novel, video game and children/young adult lit adaptations. This weekend Jonah Hex opens and I have to say, what should have been a wild ride through the old west came across like a knock-off designer bag you'd buy from a street merchant on the streets of NY. There were elements that reminded me of the late 90s film Wild Wild West, which was fun but left many feeling disappointed. I'm not sure if the translation from comic to film was lost in story or just poor casting choices, but I felt this DC comic is one that should have been left on the shelf. With a running time of only 80 minutes, one would normally wonder why such a short film since most movies these days have running times of at least 100 minutes. Thankfully Jonah Hex was on the short side because I don't know what I would have done had it been any longer.

With a handful of interesting visual concepts and several comic elements added into the film there are scenes that give you the impression that things are about to turn around, but seconds later that hope is taken away. From laughable dialogue to poor acting from the only female star of the film Jonah Hex is a summer blockbuster flop. The scenes that were manageable to sit through was primarily due to the films only saving grace Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) with his insane make-up and the costume design team giving you just what's needed to make you feel like you are back in the 1800s. If you can get past Megan Fox's (Transformers and Jeniffer's Body) lack of acting skills and John Malkovich's (Of Mice and Men and Burn After Reading) laughable make-up, I guess it's an ok movie. The concept is interesting and I'm now curious enough to pickup a comic, but I will admit that if a sequel is ever planned I will passing.
Jonah Hex is an 1800s mix that brings a little wild west flavor to some other worldly juju. If you like Josh Brolin, who plays Hex, I would say wait until this film comes out on DVD. With Megan Fox as Lilah I wish the role had gone to someone else just so it would have been a little less painful to watch. John Malkovitch, who plays Quentin Turnbull, is a laughable villain and the only thing that makes Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) as Burke cool is his tattoo. I give Jonah Hex a 2 out of 5 and say stay away if you are a fan of the comic.
Posted by Wispenaut at 1:18 PM

http://twitchfilm.net/reviews/2010/06/jonah-done-been-hexed.php

JONAH HEX Review

by Canfield, June 18, 2010 12:01 PM

The Western genre meshes well with horror and dark fantasy when done carefully. The Burrowers, Stephen Kings Wasteland series and Ravenous are all marvelous examples. They take both of their genre sources seriously and do more than combine the conventions of each. In short they are good movies, good novels, good stories. Jonah Hex is lifelessly adapted from solid source material but does not tell a good story. In fact it barely tells a story at all.

Hex (Josh Brolin) is a civil war veteran turned bounty recruited by the government to track down renegade terrorist Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) also the murderer of Hexs wife and son. Turnbull plans to unleash a nation killer weapon during the centennial celebration in Washington and Hex, together with his prostitute lover Lila (Megan Fox) is the only one who can stop him.

If this plot hackneyed wait until you see film itself which plays like it was edited by a group of seriously panicked studio execs. We get a decent bit of gunplay to start the film and badly written but tolerable character introductions but by about half an hour in the films pacing goes straight to movie hell with one unnecessary or worse disconnected moment after another winding up towards an ending that is so predictable and so lifeless you realize the execs were right to be panicked. There is literally nothing else to be said. But I'll do my best.

I haven't read the original screenplay but the fact that it's by the team of Neveldine and Taylor should be a tip off that the problems start there. This is the duo responsible for the Crank films and the recent misfire Gamer (as well as the solidly below average horror thriller Pathology). There's just no meat on the bones here. It's as if everything mildly interesting about the world Hex comes from has been bled out in favor of bland conventions. Whatever Hex was going to be it is hard to imagine it interpreted as per the frenetic visual style of Crank which is easily the best things this duo has been associated with.

It would be interesting to see the raw footage director Jimmy Hayward was working with at the beginning of the editing process. Surely the guy behind the highly entertaining Horton Hears A Who (2008) and who trained at Pixar has far more of a sense of story than this. And the films problems certainly don't rest with the actors. Brolin is predictably fun and looks great as Hex but the character, as written here, loses all of his near psychopathic bluster he had in the comics. Hex might shoot you for making fun of his face but only if you catch him relatively early in the movie. By the films end he is little more than a crass copy of James Bond or some mildly interesting secondary character from Wild Wild West. Malkovich isn't exactly slumming but his role is overshadowed early on by Michael Fassbender who plays Turnbulls henchman Burke to the absolute Irish hilt. Michael Shannon, given a lead billing here, has been edited down to a single line of dialogue offering further proof that somebody has monkeyed endlessly with this thing. Lastly, worse than anything else, is the score by the heavy metal band Mastodon. It's obnoxiously grating, completely inappropriate and turns even the most mildly interesting action sequences into self parody.

Given sufficient care Jonah Hex could have been an ultra-gritty low-budget gem. But the film all but ignores the lush supernatural landscape and creatures that dotted the comic in favor of played out action hero heroics and watered down slicked up mass appeal that will leave fans disappointed and newcomers indifferent. Expectations for Hex have been shrinking ever since reshoots were announced. But when Chicago critics received an email informing them of the films scant 81 minute run time expectations vanished. The most we could hope for was a good piece of kitsch. There is a name for what Hex does resemble and it rhymes with kitsch but I won't use it here.

http://www.movieretriever.com/blog/723/movie-review-jonah-hex

June 18, 2010
Movie Review: Jonah Hex
Posted by Turk182 in Movie Reviews

Filmmakers just can’t get away with junk like Jonah Hex any more. Despite the success of the Transformers films, audiences are generally too smart now for productions that are so sloppily thrown together that they remind them of what they didn’t like about crappy movies that came before. If you had problems with Wild Wild West, Ghost Rider, or Constantine, wait for said problems to be amplified by a movie that distills elements of all three and more into a horribly miscast, painfully edited train wreck of a summer action flick that’s notable only for the fact that it may enter and exit the public consciousness faster than anything else this year. Coming in at under 80 minutes without credits, the nicest thing that anyone can say about Jonah Hex is that it’s too short and stupid to be memorably horrible.

The great Josh Brolin (who makes it out relatively unscathed by virtue of being the only actor who’s actually well-cast in the film) plays the title character, a Civil War soldier who has been horribly scarred and left for dead by the evil Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). In fact, Hex came so close to the other side that he can still communicate with the dead whenever he needs crucial information (not unlike Pushing Daisies or even The Sixth Sense). Believing that Turnbull is dead, Hex gives up his quest for vengeance and becomes a bounty hunter, scouring the countryside looking for bad men to bring to the justice end of his Gatling guns. He has one friend in a prostitute named Lilah (Megan Fox) but their relationship is so woefully underdeveloped that she never comes off as anything more than a boring plot device. While Hex is hunting bounties, Turnbull and his men (including Michael Fassbender) are trying to create chaos in the newly reconstituted United States. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) brings in Hex, tells him Turnbull is still alive, and sets him loose to stop the mad man from destroying the country.

Rarely have you seen a supporting cast more horribly chosen than that of Jonah Hex. Who on Earth thought Wes Bentley and Will Arnett looked like believable Civil War characters? Quinn, Tom Wopat, a bizarrely truncated appearance by Michael Shannon (so short that even though he is credited most critics at my screening couldn’t even spot him) – the ensemble of Jonah Hex almost seems designed to provoke laughter. Fassbender makes it out okay but Malkovich is truly lazy here and Fox is practically half-asleep. She’s absolutely horrible.

The fact is that it’s hard to gauge the performances of Jonah Hex through the haze of some of the worst editing you will ever see. With rumored reshoots and massive cuts to get a PG-13 rating, Jonah Hex looks like it was edited on a DVD player with the chapters on shuffle. It never builds, it is downright incoherent at times, and entire characters (like Shannon’s) are clearly on the cutting room floor. It’s hard to tell if there’s any version that would have worked (although an R-rated DVD seems inevitable), but whoever thought this version was ready for release was out of their minds. It plays like a film that’s not done yet, as if the editor hated watching it repeatedly and simply refused to finish.

But would it work even if it was done? Probably not. The fact is that the script for Jonah Hex covers so much well-worn ground that it needed to do something unique to stand out and it doesn’t seem like any version would have done that. Rookie director Jimmy Hayward is so inept at shooting action scenes that there aren’t even any memorable set pieces and the plot is so routine that it provides not one genuinely surprising twist or turn. It’s a by-the-numbers comic book movie that has been so poorly edited that they skip a digit or two. There’s a new challenger when the discussion turns to the worst comic book films of all time. That is if you even remember having seen Jonah Hex by the next time you have that conversation.

Rating: ONE BONE
Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: June 18th, 2010
Rating: PG-13

http://itsjustmovies.com/11350

Under Review: ‘Jonah Hex’

– by ADAM POYNTER –

I will start my review by stating the most obvious point: this film is only 80 minutes long. At only 1 hour and 20 minutes, everything in the film was rushed and nothing delved into deeper because of a lack of time. Due to that fact, I’ll try to make sure my review does not take longer to read than the film took to watch.

The Comic: Jonah Hex first appeared in DC comics in 1971 and he got his own self-titled comic book in 1977. He has been appearing on and off since then and currently has a comic series.

Jonah Hex has traveled to the future, died and come back as a zombie in the Black Lantern Corps, had many girlfriends/wives, and done many other things. He has always remained somewhat of an outlaw, had the ability to get off any shot and is always looking for revenge or to punish the wicked and unjust. Jonah Hex has popped up from time to time in DC animated shows for guest appearances, but has never had his own show.

The Film: “Jonah Hex” opens with a pretty stereotypical battle montage, and at first glance, it could seem like a period piece. Within minutes, you have Hex (played by Josh Brolin) tied to a sideways cross, being punished and forced to watch the massacre of his wife and son because he betrayed the group of renegades, headed up by Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). Hex turned them in when he refused to go along with the slaughtering of innocent women and children. Another foundation of Turnbull’s malevolence towards Hex is his retribution for Hex being responsible for his only son’s death. Jonah Hex is then branded on the face and left for dead. Thankfully, he is found and nursed back to health, but he comes back a little bit more than human (to avoid spoilers I won’t really delve into that further).

Jonah Hex then decided to do what he does best, find bad guys and kill them so he becomes a bounty hunter, along the way trying to find and seek revenge on Turnbull, but after Turnbull is said to have committed suicide, Hex then commits his life to bounty hunting. Hex himself becomes an outlaw and has a reward on his head. Somewhere in between all of this we are introduced to Lilah (Megan Fox), a tough prostitute who has a soft spot for Hex and dreams of getting away with him someday, but Jonah won’t have that, since everyone he ever gets close to seems to wind up dead.

Surprise! Surprise! Not only is Quentin Turnbull not dead, but he’s planning one of the largest massacres in U.S. history by building a device that can annihilate whole cities and is going to use it on America. Well, the president of the United States hears about this he tells his best men to find Jonah Hex, because he is the only one that has even came close to getting Turnbull. The entire third act is mostly action and more killing as Hex tries to figure out a way to finally stop this maniac once and for all.

This movie is like a one-note perfume, it starts to draw you in and you are waiting for more levels to it, but they never come. The rushed pace that director Jimmy Hayward (“Horton Hears a Who!”) sets is exciting at times and the action and explosions are nice, but you want them to delve deeper into the characters and plots, and sadly they don’t. One of the most revealing parts of the film is a two-minute cartoon sequence that’s made to look like an animated comic book. It tells a quick back-story of the characters but ends abruptly and sends you right back into the movie.

John Malkovich portrays a good “bad guy” but he just kills everyone without a second thought, and Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex is just a brooding anti-hero who is monotone in his emotions the entire film, he has one face… and that face is revenge. You want to root for Hex but it’s hard to when you feel like you don’t even know the character. Brolin’s portrayal of Hex just kept reminding me of “The Punisher” and his whole defend the innocent and punish the wicked, but even he had a range of emotions that he showed, including mercy. Megan Fox as the sultry and headstrong prostitute is a bit more than just eye-candy. Fox herself said in an interview with “MTV” that her role was “more of a cameo then starring role…and that she just filmed her scenes for five days.” So having read that, I didn’t expect to see a lot of her or her acting chops, but she did well with the little screen time she had, and she handled the pistols and weapons very well.

There are a plethora of supporting cast members who get little to barely any screen time, including Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Michael Fassbender, Sean Boyd and John Gallgher Jr. I would have love to have seen more of these secondary characters and have gotten more intertwining storylines, instead of just all shooting and chase scenes. This film is trying to take a classic western and turn it on its head and re-invent it with an attempt to make a new genre Cowboy/Sci-Fi, but it fails. Although this movie is fun at times, the fun times pass by so quickly it’s almost hard to recognize them. If a film with a good plot and substance is what you are craving, skip “Jonah Hex.”

Running time: 80 minutes. Rated PG-13 for: intense sequences of violence and action, disturbing images and sexuality

http://blog.cmdstore.com/2010/06/18/jonah-hex-6-inch-figures-arrive-plus-the-reviews-are-coming-in/

Jonah Hex 6-inch Figures Arrive! Plus, the Reviews are Coming in!

The Jonah Hex figures have arrived and fans will be pleased to know that they look great, with likenesses that manage to do justice to John Malkovich as Quentin Turnbull , Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex and, of course, fan favourite and femme fatale Megan Fox as Leila. Each one stands about 6 inches tall and you can expect weaponry from the film to accompany the figures. Not to mention some pretty sweet cowboy hats. Look for the figures over in our Jonah Hex section:

Now, we know the figures are awesome and the Hex figure would make a great buy for fans of the character even beyond the film. But unfortunately, it seems like the movie itself isn’t looking too hot as it makes its way into theatres… Right Celebrity reports:

Early Hex reviews have called the western picture the possible “worst film of 2010”!

First the plot – “The U.S. military makes a scarred bounty hunter with warrants on his own head an offer he cannot refuse: in exchange for his freedom, he must stop a terrorist who is ready to unleash Hell on Earth.”

Sounds pretty good so far, right? Plenty of possible action ahead, decent plot and with a great cast line up of stars from Josh Brolin, to Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Will Arnett and Michael Fassbender. Apparently the Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor penned story falls short thereafter due to the mix of sci-fi with reality. Brolin’s alter ego, Jonah Hex, and his ability to resurrect the dead for interrogation purposes conjured a few chuckles among movie critics, calling it “stupid, supernatural bulls**t”!

Here’s what ComicBookMovie.com had to say when it came to Hex:

“I dont want to give away the ending but I will say the final showdown between Turnbull and Jonah Hex wasn’t very climactic. And honestly that was my biggest problem of the movie was the rhythm of it. It has a good story line but it was not well paced. It was slow for too long so as the viewer you would loose interest in the movie. I wouldn’t go as far as saying its the worst cbm ever, but I will say it had so much potential and I honestly was really let down.”

One source also went on to say that “Even with low expectations this film was a complete and utter mess.” Overall opinions in regards to the plot just go from bad to worse.

“I can tolerate a mediocre plot as long as I’m not bored out of my skull, but Jonah Hex meanders aimlessly for the majority of its runtime.”

Toy Story 3 is sure to leave Brolin and his crew in the dust this week since the pair open on the same day!

“Sadly, there’s no fixing this one. The problems are deeply rooted, and can’t be solved with an edit. Massive reshoots would be required, and that’s not going to happen before the 18th of June.”

http://blog.fjgirls.com/2010/06/18/megan-fox-and-the-jonah-hex-premiere-hollywood/

Megan Fox and the “Jonah Hex” Premiere, Hollywood!

After a long run of very dreary yawn premieres which were avoided like the plague in order to save precious time including the recent “Killers” which has got a whopping 1 star by the critics and thankfully did not appear on this site, here’s something to get the blood on the boil. Question that comes to mind though, is this yet another no hoper?

Megan Fox, a cast member in the motion picture western thriller Jonah Hex attends the premiere of the film in Los Angeles on June 17, 2010. UPI/Jim Ruymen Photo via Newscom

Jun 18 2010 Megan Fox, a cast member in the motion picture western thriller Jonah Hex attends the premiere of the film in Los Angeles on June 17, 2010. UPI/Jim Ruymen Photo via Newscom Megan Fox was the star of the show for the premiere of her latest film outing called Jonah Hex” which was held at the ArcLight Cinemas Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. This film is pretty much an all male cast with a gun toting Megan Fox who apparently wore what will become the famous corset to get her waist to an eye watering 18 inches. Jonah Hex Premiere held at The Arclight Theatres in Hollywood, California on June 17th, 2010. Megan Fox Fame Pictures, Inc

Jonah Hex Trailer

Some big names in this film including Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett and Michael Shannon. The John Malkovich name adds a bit of weight to this film as he rarely appears in anything sub standard. Megan arrived in a Giorgio Armani Privé red silk charmeuse cocktail minidress according to one of our competitors!! Julia Jones, a cast member in the motion picture western thriller Jonah Hex attends the premiere of the film in Los Angeles on June 17, 2010. UPI/Jim Ruymen Photo via Newscom

Julia Jones, a cast member in the motion picture western thriller Jonah Hex attends the premiere of the film in Los Angeles on June 17, 2010. UPI/Jim Ruymen Photo via Newscom

The Red Carpet Arrivals list:

Ashley Edner, Barbra Streisand, Bill Kelliher, Brann Dailor, Brent Hinds, Brody Dalle, Diane Lane, Eric Scott, Helen Mirren, James Brolin, Josh Brolin, Josh Homme, Julia Jones, Kay Panabaker, Lance Reddick, Mastodon, Megan Fox, Paul Haggis, Talulah Riley, Taylor Hackford, Troy Sanders, Wes Bentley

The Plot: Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is a scarred drifter and bounty hunter of last resort, a tough and stoic gunslinger who can track down anyone…and anything. Having survived death, Jonah’s violent history is steeped in myth and legend, and has left him with one foot in the natural world and one on the “other side.” His only human connection is with Lilah (Megan Fox), whose life in a brothel has left her with scars of her own. HOLLYWOOD - JUNE 17: Actress Talulah Riley arrives at premiere of Warner Bros. 'Jonah Hex' held at ArcLight Cinema's Cinerama Dome on June 17, 2010 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images) HOLLYWOOD – JUNE 17: Actress Talulah Riley arrives at premiere of Warner Bros. ‘Jonah Hex’ held at ArcLight Cinema’s Cinerama Dome on June 17, 2010 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images) Information courtesy Wikipedia!

Some Critical Views:

The film for some dubious reason is only 70 minutes long. Why is the burning question, some clues from the critics below:

David Germain of the Associated Press calls the film “So short, and so bad, you cringe at the thought of how awful whatever ended up on the cutting-room floor must be.”

This is not a good start anything a bit more positive?

Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic, “Take the intriguing premise of a punk-rock Western based on a graphic novel, populate it with a good cast, add striking visuals and you come up with…a real mess.”

Surely it’s not that bad?

Michael O Sullivan of The Washington Post :

“the way Hex can resurrect a corpse, simply by touching it, to perform a bit of postmortem interrogation, is the film’s most original touch.

Would that he could accomplish that same miracle with the film. Like Hex himself, the movie may not exactly be dead, but it sure as heck ain’t living.”

So there you have it………….A corpse of a film, we’ve heard films being called some names…….but a corpse!!!

AND We think we’ll leave it there BUT if you are a Megan Fox fan you will still go and see it anyway and suffer this regardless just to see her in that corset and toting that gun……….there’s something sexy about gun toting women….or is it me. Box office prediction……..we hope this goes No1 to give the two fingers to the critics, the Megan Fox factor will be an awfully tempting thing to resist even if the film is “a corp

http://newcityfilm.com/2010/06/18/review-jonah-hex/

Jun 18
Review: Jonah Hex
Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Western Add comments

Junky cinematography and CGI make this DC Comics-born crap hard to watch, as if it were badly inked on low-end pulp. Nor does the leaden and rusty metal score by Mastodon and Marco Beltrami do much for the ears. But it’s over in seventy-two minutes, if you skip eight minutes of blurred end credits. The title character (Josh Brolin, “No Country For Old Men”) is a Confederate Army vet who once “disobeyed a direct order” to torch a Union hospital. This prompted his sociopathic commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), to torch Hex’s Indian wife and their son, forcing Hex to watch and then branding “Q. T.” on his cheek. All this makes Hex mad as hell. He takes up bounty-hunting so he can get back at bad guys in general. Turns out one in particular did not expire in a later fire–flames are frequent in “Jonah Hex”–and Turnbull is dead-set on terrorizing the country and toppling the government. Find Hex before the 4th of July, when the s$#! is scheduled to go down. “The President thinks you’re special, even magic,” a White House aide tells Hex. It’s true that the disfigured gunslinger–he harnessed Gatling guns to his horse’s flanks–has some spooky ways of remote-sensing his enemies via corpses, and he shares wisdom with dogs, crows and Crow Indians. After saving the day in D.C. at the first centenary, Hex is offered a full pardon on par with Jack Bauer’s. And a shiny badge. “America needs a sheriff,” says President Grant (Aidan Quinn). “I’m not big on having a boss,” declines Hex, repeating an earlier rationale for siding with the Confederacy against the bossy Union. Hex thinks like Lilah (Megan Fox), his corseted counter-terrorist pal and prostitute: “I ain’t much one for being owned,” she advises a possessive client. Such a wasp-waisted figure hasn’t been seen since Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster 2.” Screenwriters Neveldine & Taylor (“Crank: High Voltage,” “Gamer”) attempt topicality with lines about finding the “trigger mechanism” for a “super-weapon” invented by Eli Whitney, Sr. that’s a “nation-killer.” There are even terrorists wearing vests packed with dynamite. I don’t recall seeing a scene like that in the pre-9/11 “Wild Wild West” (1999), where a Confederate mastermind targets President Grant. But the redundant flashbacks for dummies are no way to extend the running time. Nor does director Jimmy Hayward figure out how to handle the talents of the star of “Hunger” and of “the voice of GMC Trucks.” With Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Michael Shannon. 80m. (Bill Stamets)

http://popcultureninja.com/2010/06/18/now-playing-hex-lacks-brolins-gunslinger-lost-in-runaway-plot/


PCN Movie Review: ‘Hex’ lacks; Brolin’s gunslinger lost in runaway plot

Posted on 18 June 2010 by Bartleby

Based on the DC Comics gunslinger character of the same name, Jonah Hex tries to do for the Western what Sherlock Holmes did for Victorian detective stories – update it with some comic book sensibilities for modern audiences. Since Jonah Hex is already based on a funny book, you would think it wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish. Evidently you would be wrong, because while Sherlock Holmes successfully combined Doyle’s logical detective stories with the action of a pulp hero, Jonah Hex fails in merging super-heroics with Spaghetti Westerns. It comes out with both barrels, but unfortunately they are both empty.

Jonah Hex (PG-13) 81 min. Directed by: Jimmy Hayward Written by: Neveldine & Taylor, Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Michael Shannon, Cinematography: Mitchell Amundsen, Music by: Marco Beltrami & Mastodon

Written by: Continental Op

Ninja Rating:
1.2
There are both good things and bad things about Jonah Hex: the good thing is that it is very short (only 80 minutes in length); the bad thing is that it isn’t short enough.

Josh Brolin plays the titular character, a former Confederate soldier who turned against his commanding officers and regiment during the Civil War after they had become too bloodthirsty and willing to kill civilians. In the process of stopping a massacre at a hospital he killed his best friend, who also happened to be the son of their commanding officer, General Quentin Turnbull (played by John Malkovitch). After the war, Turnbull gets revenge for the death of his only kin by burning Hex’s family alive in front of him, branding his face and then leaving him for dead.

Now with half-a-face like melted wax, Hex sets off to track down Turnbull so he can settle the score. Unfortunately Turnbull apparently died in a saloon fire, and now denied his vengeance the bitter and disfigured Hex turns to bounty hunting. But years later after gaining a reputation as a feared gun man, Hex is approached by the U.S Government with news: Quentin Turnbull is alive and he is planning on pulling off something nefarious on the nation’s centennial, and they need Jonah to stop him.

You might be reading this and thinking to yourself that this doesn’t sound so bad. And it probably wouldn’t have been if the film had just kept it as simple as I described it, but instead they throw a bunch of stuff in there that really add nothing to the film other than give it the cosmetic appearance that it is more like a comic book. Director Jimmy Hayward (who normally directs animation) and the screenplay fail to understand that supernatural and sci-fi elements aren’t as necessary as tone for making something have that graphic comic feel.

For example, Hex can speak to the dead. That wouldn’t be so bad if they actually had a reason for why he needs to be able to speak with the dead but in the film it is used only for lazy exposition. All of the scenes where Hex uses this power could have been replaced with just old fashion dialogue between two living people. But what is a superhero story without powers, right?

Things just seem to happen in Hex for no reason other than the fact that something has to happen. Indians find Hex injured and near death and nurse him back to health because that is what Indians supposedly do. A mutant freak is introduced and then disappears from the picture. A henchman for Quentin Turnbull can turn up halfway across the country just because he has to kidnap someone close to Hex. In fact the entire film is very bad with geography, because it seems that Charleston, North Carolina and dusty desert frontier towns are only a days ride apart.

I feel sorry for Brolin because he actually delivers as Hex and his presence alone almost makes the film worth seeing. He makes Hex not only tough-as-nails but also funny, a Man With No Name with a sardonic sense of humor. The closest comparison to Hex would actually be Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, a character who’s bad-ass nature has been turned up to 11.

The rest of the cast, however, is wanting. Michael Fassbender does a serviceable job as the chief henchman, but he is hardly that memorable. John Malkovitch as Quentin Turnbull looks like he was just woken up from a nap to read his lines and can’t wait to go back to sleep. And Megan Fox brings nothing to the part of Lilah, a prostitute who is supposed to be Jonah Hex’s love interest but has zero chemistry with him.

Also, at the risk of sounding chauvinistic or pedantic, Megan Fox’s character is presented as a kick-ass woman who knows how to fight and pack iron. Now, I don’t mind the idea of a tough prostitute – I imagine such a hard life would have taught you how to survive – but the idea that she can out shoot a bunch of Civil War veterans and professional gunman seems farfetched to me. I wouldn’t think she would have much time to practice marksmanship when she is on her back most of the day with her legs over her head.

The worst thing that can be said about this film is that for all the action it is actually very boring. Only the pulsating music by Mario Beltrami and Mastodon keeps you awake at times, especially when Brolin isn’t on screen. The film’s climax involves a steampunk super-weapon, and even that is so uninteresting it will have people remembering the giant spider from Wild, Wild West with fondness. That, unfortunately, is saying a lot.

http://www.destroythebrainonline.com/2010/06/18/review-jonah-hex/

Review: JONAH HEX
June 18th, 2010 | by Andy

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.

http://www.aloo-gobi.com/?p=29741

Jonah Hex Review
Posted on 18 June 2010

Jonah Hex is to film what the chicken nugget is to cuisine. Bland, anonymous, packed with non-nutritious filler, prepared without pride or love, easiest to consume if you’re not paying attention. This is industrially processed entertainment at it cheapest, nastiest and greasiest.

Josh Brolin plays the title character, a Civil War veteran wandering the lawless, chaotic West, where the main activity of daily life is settling old scores. Fight scenes erupt every five minutes. This is not a comment on the Hobbesian brutality of the untamed frontier. The players continually empty the contents of their guns into each other because the filmmakers, recognizing they haven’t given us interesting characters to follow, fear we’ll get bored…read more [StarTribune]

I have no idea what occurred behind the scenes of Jonah Hex, beyond the broad strokes that have been reported. But I do know that the final product is barely a shell of a film, a barely functioning picture that makes it to feature length only through repeated scenes and random thematic detours. At just 73 minutes long without end credits, it is the shortest live-action film I have ever seen in a theater. Heck, many of Warner Bros’ direct-to-DVD DC Comics animated features are longer. Like past films that were heavily-tinkered to no avail in post-production, there is just enough of a kernel of substance and thought to make one mourn the final cut. The failure of Jonah Hex is not a cause for gloating or mockery. It is a tragedy…read more [Huffington Post]

The thriller involves a man named Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), who is bent on vengeance. During the Civil War, the evil Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) strapped him to a cross and made him watch as a house containing his family was set afire. Then Turnbull branded Jonah’s face with a hot iron, causing difficulties with leaks when he tries to throw back a shot of whiskey. You can see why Jonah would want his revenge. To be sure, Turnbull mutters something about Jonah having previously murdered his family, meaning he isn’t entirely without motive.
Stunk Crick is your standard frontier town with a wide Main Street, a saloon, and a room over the saloon occupied by Lilah, a sexy hooker. The presence of Lilah in the film is easily explained: She is played by Megan Fox. If you want a woman in an old western town, there are only three occupations open to her, hooking, schoolmarming, and anyone called Ma…read more [Roger Ebert]

I feel sorry for everyone involved with Jonah Hex. Firstly there’s the cast stuck in this silly period comic book movie — even the ones required only to play unsettling cartoon versions of themselves (Malkovich), talk miserably through speech-impeding prosthetics (Brolin), or shoot pistols while maintaining optimal period cleavage, in the grand tradition of feisty, old-timey, one-dimensional prostitutes (Megan Fox). Secondly, I feel for director Jimmy Hayward, whose sophomore directing turn will go down as the most chopped up, stitched together Frankenstein job in recent memory. But most of all, I feel sorry for myself for having to sit through the entirety of this schizophrenic shoot ‘em up mess of a movie — it’s technically only 75 minutes long, but felt three times longer…read more [Movies.com]

In honor of the soon-to-be-released motion picture which seems to have little in common with the current comic book series that bears its name, the latest issue of Jonah Hex bears a “now a major motion picture” advertisement above the title and comes packaged with a free movie poster. It also features not one but two short stories depicting the disfigured gunslinger in all his unholy glory and would probably serve as a great primer for anyone who saw the film and made their way to the local comic shop… not that anyone actually does that, but if they did, this would be a great issue to start with…read more [Mania.com]

JONAH HEX was scripted and originally set to be directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the maniacs behind the CRANK movies, who departed the project over creative differences and whose berserk stylings might have at least given the incoherent proceedings a nutty charge. Their replacement at the helm was Jimmy Hayward, a former Pixar animator making his live-action feature debut (coincidentally opening the same day as TOY STORY 3, which finds LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE scripter Michael Arndt making the reverse trip far more successfully). Hayward in turn was reportedly supplanted in postproduction by I AM LEGEND director Francis Lawrence, who oversaw reshoots and other doctoring. But the Humpty Dumpty of a movie that has resulted seems to have been put back together without all the necessary pieces; the story doesn’t flow, people and ideas appear and disappear willy-nilly and the big action scenes are perfunctory and undercooked…read more [Fangoria]

In a summer full of remakes and adaptations, you won’t find a film less original than Jonah Hex. Based on the DC comic series of the same name, Jonah Hex is 80 minutes of clichés pasted together into one agonizingly predictable plot.
The eponymous Hex was a soldier in the Confederate army until his regiment was captured and Hex made an unspecified decision that resulted in the death of all his men. Among them was his friend, Jed Turnbull. After the war Jed’s father, Quentin Turnbull, seeking revenge murdered Jonah’s family, branded his face, and left him crucified to die. Rescued and brought back from the brink of death by mystical Indian magic (twice), Hex turns to bounty hunting, convinced that Quentin died in a fire, and cursed with the unnatural ability to speak with corpses. But when the senior Turnbull reappears with a 19th century weapon of mass destruction and dark designs for the Union, Jonah Hex will finally have his turn at revenge…read more [Movies Online]

It admittedly starts off great guns, but all too quickly it becomes apparent that the big-screen arrival of the supernatural Western DC Comics series “Jonah Hex” is firing loud, empty blanks.
Although Josh Brolin is fine and dandy as the Civil War vet-turned-vengeful bounty hunter with one foot in the grave and a horrendously scarred face, the tortured anti-hero isn’t alone when it comes to being cut to the bone…read more [THR]

Some movies seem so blatant an effort to appeal to a specific target audience that they ought to come with a viewers’ advisory warning.
The opening frame of Jonah Hex should say: “Caution: Made expressly for the male teen demographic. Not suitable for anyone of any age who prefers movies with coherence, an original plot or characters they give a hoot about.”
Based on a series from DC Comics, Jonah Hex is about a gunslinging loner hellbent on vengeance for the murders of his wife and son. Lest anyone forget what movie they came to see, characters repeat “Jonah Hex” a couple of dozen times during the course of this inane action flick…read more [USA Today]

The movie transpires in the post-Civil War era, with two ex-Confederate soldiers squaring off against one another. On one side is the twisted General Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who is assembling a doomsday weapon that he intends to turn against Washington D.C. and use to end the presidency of U.S. Grant (Aidan Quinn). On the other side is Jonah Hex, the scarred bounty hunter and ex-subordinate of Turnbull’s whose face bears the marks of a brand wielded by the General on the night he killed Hex’s wife and son. Hex is not an ordinary man, either. Rescued from death by Indian magic, he’s almost impossible to kill and he possesses the ability to speak with the dead. Hex’s lone weakness is a prostitute named Lilah (Megan Fox), who pines for him while entertaining clients. Before he can offer Lilah a better life, however, Hex must settle his score with Turnbull and his sadistic sidekick, Burke (Michael Fassbender)…read more [Reelviews]

http://www.ottawasun.com/entertainment/movies/2010/06/17/14425611.html

Sunday, June 20, 2010

‘Jonah Hex’ script a mess

By KEVIN WILLIAMSON, QMI Agency

Last Updated: June 18, 2010 2:00am

<br>Jonah Hex <br>Stars: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender <br>Directed by: Jimmy Hayward <br>Running time: 1 hour, 21 min.

Jonah Hex
Stars: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender
Directed by: Jimmy Hayward
Running time: 1 hour, 21 min.

As weird and mangled as its anti-hero's grimace, Jonah Hex is what happens when the writers of Crank meet the director of Horton Hears a Who. Ask yourself: Would Lady and the Tramp have been better if directed by Sergio Leone? Would Lonesome Dove have been improved if penned by Dr. Seuss? And why are the scribes of Crank (and Gamer) still working?

Questions that, had they been asked while the Hex script was being hammered out, might have spared all of us -- filmmakers and audiences alike -- from the bombastic, baffling, frenetic yet wooden result. How did it all go so wrong? How it is possible for any movie to seemingly borrow from Unforgiven, Wild Wild West and TV's Pushing Daisies -- all at the same time?

While the unfortunate prime culprit must be director Jimmy Hayward, it's undoubtedly unfair to blame a fiasco of this scope on a single individual. After all, there's the issue of whether or not Hex, the long-running, oft-cancelled DC Comics western outlaw, should have even received the big-screen treatment. Is Hollywood so starved for ideas it has to turn to failed comics for source material? And yes, I'm asking rhetorically.

It's a shame, certainly, for its star Josh Brolin, who is enjoyably grizzled as Hex, a ruthless bounty hunter still haunted by scars -- both internal and external -- left from the American Civil War. Not just because his performance is worthwhile, but because he's managed to assemble one of the most eclectic ensembles ever gathered in the name of summertime blockbusterdom.

Don't believe me? In addition to John Malkovich and Michael Fassbender as Hex's chief antagonists, the cast includes Will Arnett, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Aidan Quinn and Michael Shannon; even the stray dog Hex befriends has charisma. But the truncated running time -- less than an hour and a half -- leaves little opportunity for anyone to register. Shannon -- one of the most electrifying character actors working today -- appears so fleetingly, his own mother might blink and miss him.

Focus instead remains fixed squarely on Hex, who receives a chance for revenge and redemption when he learns the man who slaughtered his family, Confederate colonel Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich ... or is it Willie Nelson playing Malkovich?), isn't dead, as he had believed. Instead Turnbull has become one of the fledging nation's most treacherous enemies -- a homegrown terrorist mastermind, complete with a militia.

Further muddying matters are Hex's largely unexplained supernatural powers -- he has the ability to communicate with the dead, bringing corpses back to lurching life -- and Turnball's acquisition of a "super weapon" (think steampunk nukes) that can level entire cities.

Not surprisingly, the movie's tone is similarly conflicted, veering from comedy to drama to romance, as we're introduced to Hex's love interest Lilah (Megan Fox), a hooker with -- wait for it -- a heart of gold. Fox is adequately smouldering in the role, even if it's her corset that does most of the work. It's never clear why she's attracted to Hex or why he refuses to settle down with her, aside from his observation that everyone close to him ends up dying. And it's this lack of character development that makes it so difficult to care about anyone on-screen (well, aside from the dog).

By the grinding climax, the film is smash-cutting between a showdown on a ship, and Brolin and Malkovich brawling in some kind of red clay under-verse, intended, I think, to represent the nether world between this life and the next. Whatever. All I know is, the end couldn't come fast enough.

(This film is rated 14A)

http://www.crosswalk.com/movies/11633376/

Jonah Hex Sputters, Stalls
Christian Hamaker
Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer

Release Date: June 18, 2010

Rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of action and violence, disturbing images and sexual content)

Genre: Action, Western, Adaptation

Run Time: 80 min.

Director: Jimmy Hayward

Actors: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Aidan Quinn, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Tom Wopat

There's a hex on 2010's summer movies, as one film after another has disappointed and underperformed. Even by the lax standards of summer moviegoing, this year's crop has been a letdown for audiences, who have found other ways to spend their money and time.

Jonah Hex, a DC Comics adaptation, doesn't reverse the trend. The film has all the ingredients of a strong summer movie—it features a rising star (Josh Brolin, of No Country for Old Men and American Gangster) in the title role and Transformers It-Girl Megan Fox. Add John Malkovich to give it some serious-actor cred, and the on-screen energy should be combustible. But Jonah Hex is far from it.

The film starts well enough, paying homage to its comic roots and finding an appropriate tone as it lays out the back story of Hex (Brolin). He's a wronged man in the immediate post-Civil War era who has suffered great personal loss, and who has grown disillusioned by the war he saw all around him. Now a bounty hunter, Hex's skills prove attractive to the president, Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn), who needs Hex's skills to find Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich).

Turnbull is intent on destabilizing the fragile union after the war, but Hex has his own uncertainties about his nation. "Your country needs you," says the man assigned to bring Hex in. "Ain't my country," Hex responds, claiming that the Union and Confederacy were both full of hypocrites.

Hex has seen too much killing and has the scars—both emotional and physical—to show it. His facial disfigurement came at the hands of Turnbull, who has turned his destructive sights onto a larger target. Consumed by a hatred of the Union, he sets out to kill the president using futuristic weapons of mass destruction. Apparently only one man can stop him.

Jonah Hex was a problem-plagued production that went through several directors and reshoots. It's difficult to envision from the final product what the film might have been if it hadn't been truncated (at 80 minutes, this is one of the shortest U.S. major releases in memory). As it stands, the movie chugs along for about 45 minutes in watchable, if not particularly edifying, fashion. It has some stylistic flair that suits its revisionist-Western genre trappings—an antihero who lives by his own code, the prostitute (Fox) he cares for and the protagonist's unwillingness to settle down. ("Anyone who gets close to me dies," he tells his lover, expressing a basic truth about all Western gunslingers).

The story also is unique in Hex's ability to ascertain key information in his pursuit of Turnbull. Without giving too much away, it's safe to say that Hex's ability to communicate with certain parties is far from explicable and raises obvious theological questions. (Fans of TV's Pushing Daisies may be reminded of that beloved program, which, unlike Jonah Hex, was consigned to obscurity far too soon.)

The film falters when it begins to spend time on Turnbull rather than with Hex. The villain simply isn't as compelling a figure as Hex, and Malkovich can do only so much with the character. Worse is the film's abandonment of coherency about two-thirds of the way through its brief running time. The story rushes toward its finale without a proper buildup, depriving viewers of the sense of the high stakes involved in the film's climactic clash. Lots of explosions can't compensate for the numbing predictability of the outcome.

Most of the elements of a successful film were in place for Jonah Hex. The blame may lie with screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Gamer, Crank), but the film has been cut so severely that it's hard to know whether the original script was the main problem the filmmakers were trying to overcome.

Let's hope for better things in the future from everyone involved with this project. You're better off spending your movie dollars elsewhere.


Questions? Comments? Contact the writer at crosswalkchristian@verizon.net.

CAUTIONS:

*

Language/Profanity: Lord's name taken in vain; some foul language.
*

Smoking/Drinking/Drugs: Jonah drinks; a fighter in a ring has an unidentified liquid in a bottle poured into his mouth.
*

Sex/Nudity: A prostitute is Hex's lover, and she fights off other men during the film; kissing and scenes of Hex and her in bed, on top of each other, but no nudity is shown.
*

Violence/Crime: War violence, including several men shooting each other; a home is burned with a woman and child inside it; Hex's face is branded; shootouts and explosions; a train is blown up; Turnbull uses destructive weapons to wipe out an entire village and its inhabitants, and to attack the government; a corpse is struck with a shovel; a woman stabs a man; a knife is put to a woman's throat, but she fights back; a man is shot in the head, just out of frame; a man is pushed into a whirring propeller; a boat is blown up.
*

Religion: Hex is hung on a wooden cross of sorts and forced to watch his family and home burn; corpses are reanimated temporarily, and one says that people on the other side are waiting for Hex; a Native American healing ritual; discussion of the characteristics of a man with vengeance in his heart.

http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=2099

June 17, 2010
Jonah Hex

starstar
A movie review by James Berardinelli
Jonah Hex

ACTION:

United States, 2010

U.S. Release Date:

2010-06-18

Running Length:

1:20

MPAA Classification:

PG-13 (Violence, Sexual Content)

Theatrical Aspect Ratio:

2.35:1

Cast:

Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Aidan Quinn

Director:

Jimmy Hayward

Screenplay:

Neveldine & Taylor, based on characters appearing in DC Comics magazines

Cinematography:

Mitchell Amundsen

Music:

Marco Beltrami, John Powell

U.S. Distributor:

Warner Brothers

Subtitles:

none

With its skinny running length (80 minutes, including credits), often incoherent narrative, and neutered violence, Jonah Hex shows all the signs of having been re-worked in the editing room. The resultant production, as is often the case in situations like this, would be better off going straight-to-video. And, if this represents the true vision of director Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who), then I have only one question: What was he thinking?

Jonah Hex is short enough, slick enough, and loud enough to avoid being summarily dismissed. Although the storyline, with its bizarre ventures into mysticism and necromancy, is at times difficult to follow (at least for someone not conversant with the comic book source material), the movie is never boring. It is, however, frustrating. The lead character, Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), is a Civil War-era vigilante with a thirst for blood and death-dealing. Yet, obsessed by the desire to release this with a PG-13 rating, Warner Brothers has sanitized an avalanche of gruesome killings beyond what's reasonable. So, despite the high body count, there's almost no viscera. Defending the decision to circumvent the R-rating is fruitless, especially considering that the PG-13 restrictions are more distracting than effective. I mean, if a movie is about a stone-cold killer, shouldn't it be honest enough to show his work?

The movie transpires in the post-Civil War era, with two ex-Confederate soldiers squaring off against one another. On one side is the twisted General Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who is assembling a doomsday weapon that he intends to turn against Washington D.C. and use to end the presidency of U.S. Grant (Aidan Quinn). On the other side is Jonah Hex, the scarred bounty hunter and ex-subordinate of Turnbull's whose face bears the marks of a brand wielded by the General on the night he killed Hex's wife and son. Hex is not an ordinary man, either. Rescued from death by Indian magic, he's almost impossible to kill and he possesses the ability to speak with the dead. Hex's lone weakness is a prostitute named Lilah (Megan Fox), who pines for him while entertaining clients. Before he can offer Lilah a better life, however, Hex must settle his score with Turnbull and his sadistic sidekick, Burke (Michael Fassbender).

Most of Jonah Hex follows Hex, who bears a passing resemblance to something out of one of George Romero's "Dead" movies, as he kills people (all of which deserve their fates). Most of them are related to Turnbull in one way or another. There are scenes that take place in some sort of parallel, mystical arena - a one-on-one affair that transpires on red sand and reflects the situation in the "real" world. The specifics of this are never made clear, although perhaps this is second-nature stuff to Jonah Hex fans. The best thing that can be said about Jonah Hex is that it has the good sense not to take itself too seriously (there's a fun scene in which Hex pulls out some serious gunfighting hardware that's a few decades ahead of its time); the tongue isn't always planted in the cheek, but it's there often enough.

Josh Brolin does a game job growling his way through the part and generally looks like a badass under a lot of latex. He is often upstaged by the nicely staged visual setups and the loud metal music, but that's what he signed on for, and he delivers the requisite one-liners with aplomb. He's also not as enjoyable as John Malkovich, who lives by the rulebook for overplaying the bad guy. It's always a problem when the villain is more interesting and charismatic than the hero. Megan Fox is on hand to provide eye candy. She has no character to speak of, and her screening time is so limited that it wouldn't have been hard to eliminate her, except then the movie would have been short its token corseted brunette. The part suits the level of acting talent she has thus far exhibited.

It's hard to fault the idea behind Jonah Hex - the concept of an 1870s vigilante is pregnant with potential, but the execution is awful. Without an understanding of what occurred behind-the-scenes, it's impossible to know who to blame for the final result, but something this messy should have been cleaned up before reaching the screen. Jonah Hex, like so many DC Comics properties not featuring Batman or Superman, fails a successful transition from the printed page to the big screen.

http://hollywoodandfine.com/reviews/?p=2476

June 18, 2010
‘Jonah Hex’: Bad movie mojo

You look at a movie like “Jonah Hex” and wonder whether the Hollywood studio system is really as badly out of whack as British Petroleum’s safety record. It’s such a colossal waste of time that even thinking about seeing it would squander precious seconds of your life.

How do you explain a movie this dreadful getting made? With Oscar-nominated actors in the cast?

Where did it go wrong? Well, Can we start with the fact that it was directed by the guy who made “Horton Hears a Who”? Anyone see a problem there?

Yes, I understand how an actor like Josh Brolin gets seduced into playing a role like this: His agent tells him, “Here’s the pay-off for years of playing supporting roles - the chance to play a lead, the title role, in a potential tent-pole film based on a comic book. And a huge payday.” Sorry, Josh – this tent is terminally moth-eaten.

And John Malkovich? Well, he’s apparently got an expensive life in France to maintain, so the chance to play an over-the-top villain in a big-budget studio film must have seemed like an easy paycheck role. Too easy: Malkovich walks through this movie blankly, letting his jowls and stringy hair extensions play the role for him.

This movie apparently cost a lot of money and yet no one seems to have actually read the script before they started. Or maybe it’s that they didn’t realize how terrible things were until they got it into the editing room – and then it was too late.

That probably accounts for why the film is barely 80 minutes long – including credits. And why actor Michael Shannon has a lengthy bio in the press kit for playing a character that shows up in the film for less than a minute. Or why Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s name isn’t mentioned at all (good choice, there, Jeff). Blink and you’ll miss Tom Wopat. Meanwhile, the terrific Irish actor Michael Fassbender can be excused for taking the role of a vicious, tattooed villain in a film that takes him out of the indie ranks for a moment.

Based on a cult (read: obscure) comic book from the 1970s, “Jonah Hex” does the western no favors. When this movie bombs, people will jump to the conclusion that the problem is the fact that it’s a western, rather than it’s a lame comic book cash-in. Or just a piece of crap, independent of being a western.

To summarize: Jonah Hex was a Confederate soldier who was captured and then gave up his old company to the Union. He earned the enmity of his commander, Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich) by doing so, then killed Turnbull’s son – Hex’s best friend – to keep him from torching a hospital full of women and children at Turnbull’s orders.

So Turnbull killed Hex’s family and put his brand on Hex’s cheek, which Hex then made worse by trying to burn it off with a hot tomahawk. Hex came close to death, yada yada, saved by the Indians, yada yada, the power to communicate with the dead, yada yada, now he’s a bounty hunter wanted by the army, yada yada, offered a pardon by President Grant to hunt down Turnbull, who is planning to blow up Washington, D.C., during the country’s centennial.

Yada freaking yada.

If I wanted to think about it that much – and, believe me, it doesn’t deserve this much thought – there’s a tea-bagger subtext that’s not even that sub-. Hex was a Confederate soldier, not because he believed in slavery or even in states’ rights, but because he didn’t like the government “telling me what to do.” The Malkovich character, still a stalwart of the now-dead Confederacy, takes it a step further, vowing to destroy what he considers an illegitimate government in Washington. But even that is giving this movie too much credit.

There’s plenty of action and lots of exploding fireballs, but nary an ounce of tension. Indeed, everyone, not just Malkovich, seems to be sleepwalking through this film. Except for Megan Fox, who is such a terrible actress that she couldn’t even act like she’s sleepwalking.

No two ways about it – this movie sucks with a capital slurp.

http://ricksflickspicks.animationblogspot.com/2010/06/17/jonah-hex-2010/

JONAH HEX (2010) (*1/2)
17 06 2010

I went into this film knowing only the basics about the title character. Jonah Hex is a severely scarred bounty hunter with some supernatural abilities. His family was murdered. The film didn’t really expand my knowledge and in some ways confused me even more. At 80 some minutes, there were times I thought I was watching a reel of the cut scenes from the JONAH HEX videogame.

The film begins with Hex (Josh Brolin, MILK) voicing a montage of his time fighting for the Confederacy. He explains why war suited him and why that changed. Then the story jarringly cuts to Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, BURN AFTER READING) burning Hex’s family alive and branding his former soldier as he explains that he’s doing so because Hex betrayed him and murdered his son, who was Hex’s best friend. Then we jarringly cut to what seems like an excerpt from the JONAH HEX motion comic filling us in on how Hex nearly died, gained some powers, has something to do with crows and that Turnbull presumably died in a fire. For all intents and purposes, the first act of the film is simply told to the viewer instead of shown.

The story begins to show us events in a scene where Hex delivers the bodies of men he was assigned to kill. A gunfight ensues and enemies pop up in clock towers and out of coffins like it’s a shooting gallery. It’s also the first of many times Hex rides away with an explosion behind him. He has a thing for dramatic getaways. Turns out, Turnball is not dead. How he survived I can’t say if it was even explained. President Grant (Aidan Quinn, BENNY & JOON) fears that the Confederate general is building a doomsday device originally conceived by Eli Whitney. The Commander in Chief knows Hex will want revenge so he’s the perfect man to hire to save America.

The rest of the film is simply Hex moving from one set piece to the next in search of Turnbull and his weapon. The narrative is so truncated that one rarely knows the connection of one character to the next. Only two other characters emerge — prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox, TRANSFORMERS) and Turnbull’s Irish right hand assassin Burke (Michael Fassbender, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). While the story tries to develop Lilah as a tough independent woman, she turns simply into a damsel in distress/last minute sidekick. There’s an episode with an obsessive client that ends dramatically, but leads to no ramifications. Fox is not given more than she was given with the robots. Fassbender shows why he’s a hot actor in Hollywood at the moment. He gives the tattooed thug some personality. During a train heist, I liked how he casually whistles a tune as he prepares to blow a ton of dynamite.

As for the other characters, who knows? TV’s Luke Duke, aka actor Tom Wopat, shows up as Confederate colonel Slocum. He’s at some underground fight club where a lizard man fights some guy. If you blink you’ll miss Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (REVOLUTIONARY ROAD) as Doc Cross Williams. Had to look up that character name. AMERICAN BEAUTY’s Wes Bentley plays Adlman Lusk, some guy who has something that Turnbull needs. Funnyman Will Arnett (BLADES OF GLORY) has the all-too-serious role of Lt. Grass, some soldier Pres. Grant talks to in the Oval Office. And don’t forget FRINGE’s Lance Reddick, a kind of African-American Q, who supplies fancy weapons to Hex and the modern audience a reason for forgiving the scared guy for fighting for the Confederates. Oh, and don’t forget the magic Indians who are far better than any Calvary in a crisis.

Because the film doesn’t take a lick of time to set up any character in the first act, every scene that follows is void of emotional connection. One of Hex’s powers is to reanimate the dead and speak with them. He has a heart to heart with Turnbull’s son, but it means nothing because it’s the first time we’ve ever seen Turnbull’s son. If the crux of the whole story is Hex getting revenge for the murder of his wife and son, you got to give us more than one scene where Lilah names Hex’s scars to make us care about their relationship. And a brief flashback two-thirds into the film of Hex with his family is a little too late in the game to create any emotional engagement.

Even on a technical level, the film seems to betray the story. Scenes are cut so abruptly that one loses the sense of time and place within the movie. Visually the film looks good, but too often, Fox is airbrushed so much that one thinks you’ve gone back to the days of Vaseline on the lens. Explosions and supernatural effects need characters behind them, not just galloping away in front of them. The film is so obsessed with its razzle-dazzle that one closing fight scene isn’t enough, so it’s intercut with a fantasy fight scene as well.

I had high hopes for this one. I like Brolin and he’s good in it. I was hoping for an iconic supernatural Western. The elements seem there for that to be the case, but the film doesn’t seem interested in telling that story. Or any story at all.

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