Jonah Hex reviews

http://celluliodlove.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/jonah-hex-woeful-western/

Jonah Hex: Woeful Western
By jbs23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0zSd_DQQ4 …trailer

Jonah Hex… 1/2 star (out of four)

The writing was on the wall I suppose. “Jonah Hex” was a DC Comic that I had never heard about. There’s a reason apparently. This film was so poor that before it was even released to the moviegoing public that Legendary Pictures brought in Francis Lawrence (director of “I am Legend”) to clean up the mess that first-time director Jimmy Heyward made. Oh it is a laughable mess. Mercifully the film runs just 81 minutes. Then again that’s also its problem.

The title character is played by Josh Brolin and he has an atypical back story. He was an honorable soldier in the Confederate army who ratted his superior officer, Colonel Turnbull (John Malkovich). Funny that one character says Hex didn’t believe in slavery or the states-rights thing yet he fought for the South. Anyway, Turnbull”s son was killed as a result of Hex but then again the Colonel was trying to kill everyone in a hospital because the screenplay thinks that will make him dislikable. Turnbull somehow escapes Union custody (never addressed) and brands Hex’s face and kills his family so he’ll “never forget” or something like that. The first ten minutes or so are alright. Then…

Firstly the plot doesn’t make any sense. Turnbull plans to use some incredible weapon to wipe DC off the face of the Earth. This is 1876 but according to Turnbull, Eli Whitney made this weapon which resembles something along the lines of WMD. For those of us who are not high, Whitney invented the Cotton Gin and it’s 1876 and WMD’s are not in service. Next there is the business of the film’s backstory. That is to say, there is none. We don’t know why Hex married a Cherokee women before he actually encountered them in his near death experience. We also don’t know why the 42 year old Brolin would be written to sleep with the 23 year old Megan Fox. Not only is that wrong (then again it IS the South) in the real world, it’s wrong in 1876 movie time. Fox’s plays a hooker who apparently sleeps with Hex a lot. Their chemistry is that the level of Rodman and his shrink. It also seems peculiar that a man hellbent on avenging his wife and kid would spend his off time banging a whore who he blatantly tells “we have no future.”

Many other parts of the movie just sort of wander in an awful daze. Hex’s near death experience made him an agent of the supernatural. He can wake the dead, interrogate them and he vomits crows. Funny that in no way, shape or form does this impact the other characters or outcome of the movie really. There’s also the supporting cast. Michael Fassbender plays an Irish lad whose content to run around with a nutty smile on his face even when Hex is tossing him into a running propeller. Michael Shannon (academy award nominated for “Revolutionary Road”) is in the movie too but…I couldn’t find him. I’m serious. I sat through the whole thing and not once did I say “ooh it’s Michael Shannon”. Maybe his scenes were cut. Maybe I’m an irresponsible viewer. I vote the latter.

The acting is brutal as well. Malkovich maybe entitled as he is a great actor who’s in it for the paycheck. From his hysterical haircut to his need to take down the North, it all comes across as a one part-overacting, two parts bored. Then there’s Fox. I never wanted to jump on the hate-train for her but I sort of get it now. Every role she plays with one note and supposedly she’s an action-hero in this. Nope, not buying. It’s no wonder that in she’s been in this and the “Transformers” series. You see these are the rare breed of movies’ that don’t specifically require people to act.

“Jonah Hex” is just a terrible movie. From the fact that it’s supposedly a Western set in the South, yet it still looks like Arizona, to the oh-so obvious and utterly shoddy special effects “Jonah Hex” is the worst film of the year. Too bad for Brolin, but then again he’ll still get the paycheck.

http://exclaim.ca/motionreviews/latestsub.aspx?csid1=145&csid2=5&fid1=47410


Jonah Hex
Directed by Jimmy Hayward
By Scott A. Gray

As far as epic failures go, Jonah Hex is in an elite class. Based on the DC Comics character of the same name, and mangled face, this insultingly inept wad of cinematic trash demonstrates a fundamental mishandling of the source material the likes of which makes Daredevil look like The Dark Knight.

In this mega-hack version, Hex is still a former confederate solider who is seen as a turncoat by General Quentin Turnbull, but the reasoning is stupefying in its brittle idiocy. Turnbull went crazy and started slaughtering innocents (don't worry about reasons, there aren't any) and Hex wouldn't go along for the ride, so he reported Turnbull to the authorities. The mad general's son tried to gun Hex down and died in the process, so of course Turnbull vows vengeance and makes Hex watch while he burns his family alive and brands Hex's face as a mnemonic device (no, that's not entirely how Hex's face gets so pretty).

All of this unfolds in a crappy montage with voiceover muting all of the action before the title drops. Throw in some bad animation to remind us this is a comic property being butchered and then we jump forward to where the tale of stupidity really starts. The mind buckles trying to describe just how many things went wrong with this film. How about dual gatling guns on Hex's horse or a predilection for inexplicable, over the top explosions and fires?

Want more? Since he almost died once, Hex can talk to the dead and every time Hex is mortally wounded, a native tribe conveniently finds him and resurrects him by pouring gunk on the wounds. He then pukes up a crow and goes back to ass kicking, good as new. Oh, and then there's the actual "plot."

Turnbull is a terrorist trying to build a super-weapon and decimate America. The attempts at drama are horribly overwrought and sadly, only Josh Brolin as Hex seems in on the joke. He's a perfect fit for Hex's gritty, wise-ass persona, and Megan Fox fares decently well in a horribly underwritten role, even though she and the rest of the cast are practically begging for direction.

John Malkovich and Michael Fassbender make asses of themselves in extremely campy caricatures of villainy. Will Arnett (Arrested Development) takes great pains to not be funny, while the talents of Lance Reddick (Lost, The Wire) and Wes Bentley (American Beauty) are completely squandered.

Most of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of first-time live action director Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who!), but a special award goes out to whoever hacked Neveldine and Taylor's script into sh*#&%, illogical bits. And the editor. And the out of place metal riffage punctuating the lameness of every other scene.

I could go on, but this should be enough of deter anyone not seeking a cut-rate lobotomy. Did I mention the guns that shoot dynamite? (Warner)

http://www.mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=3007

Uploaded: Friday, June 18, 2010, 10:16 AM

Review: 'Jonah Hex'
(Two stars)

Action and eye candy are the main ingredients in this shallow adaptation of the edgy DC comic about Civil War-era gunslinger Jonah Hex. Compelling plot and character development get lost somewhere between explosion No. 1 and explosion No. 78, but the film certainly satisfies the popcorn quotient for summer cinema.

Hex (Josh Brolin) is a scar-faced bounty hunter whose main motivation is vengeance after he was forced to watch sadistic military man Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) torch his home and murder his family. Nearing the brink of death somehow imbued Hex with arcane abilities to speak to the deceased -- abilities that prove useful as Hex hunts down Turnbull and his tattooed sidekick Burke (Michael Fassbender of "Inglourious Basterds").

But Turnbull's dastardly machinations go well beyond Jonah and his kin. He and his crew of loyal miscreants are bitter that the Union has won the Civil War, and set out to destroy the country using high-tech explosives. President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) asks for Hex's aid -- along with his array of impressive weaponry -- to take Turnbull down for good. Hex's growing fondness for seductive and independent prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox) complicates matters, but retribution is a powerful motivator.

At a piddling 81 minutes, "Jonah Hex" never provides any real character depth or background. The audience isn't given much opportunity to care about Hex, Lilah or anyone else, making the film all spectacle and little substance. The script is generic and bland, although it seems to stay relatively true to the source material. And the hard-rock soundtrack becomes distracting from scene to scene.

Brolin is admirable in the leading-man role, but his scar prosthetic forces him to snarl and growl his way through his lines, and about 20 percent of his dialogue gets lost in translation. Fassbender is one of the film's highlights and he gives a charismatic spark to what could have been a dull henchman.

Malkovich, though, sleepwalks through his performance in one of the most lackluster portrayals the otherwise excellent actor has ever offered. Fox neither helps nor hurts the film, though her inclusion will certainly satisfy the male demographic the movie is geared toward.

Some comic-book adaptations make for a big-screen bang. This one should have stayed holstered.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, intense sequences of action, intense sequences of violence and disturbing images. 1 hour, 21 minutes.

— Tyler Hanley

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/jonah-hex/4868

Jonah Hex *

by Nick Schager on June 17, 2010 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own
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Magic balls are the lynchpin of Jonah Hex's finale. Specifically, big black explosive balls which are detonated by small orange glowy balls. Where did these balls come from? How do they interact with each other? And from what are they constructed? Feel free to make up your own explanations since none are proffered by Jimmy Hayward's film (maybe they're demonic vessels containing the angry souls of fallen soldiers! Or they're containers filled with that most destructively rancid of liquids: Sunny D!). Regardless of the surrounding story's supernatural elements, this ball-on-ball WMD (laughably referred to as simply the "super weapon") is an inexplicable mystery that makes no sense from any vantage point, especially given that it exists in 1876, and can only be utilized via a gargantuan ship-mounted six-shooter cannon that facial-hairy Confederate "terrorista" Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) seems to have constructed in approximately two days time. And from plans originally drawn up by Eli Whitney. I am not making this up.

Jonah Hex, however, definitely appears to be making itself up as it goes along. Screenwriters Neveldine and Taylor long since disowned their script, and the finished product certainly suggests a tale horribly warped by rewrites and a lack of firm direction. So many ideas, conflicts and subplots are hastily smushed together that, were it not for the narration of bounty hunter Hex (Josh Brolin) or the familiar-faced supporting players (Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lance Reddick, a blink-and-you'll-miss-him Michael Shannon) whose roles have been cut to ribbons in the editing room, there'd be no making heads or tails of this adaptation of the DC comics series. Which isn't to suggest that what did make it on screen is the least bit lucid, though the basic plot (scored, thuddingly, by Mastodon) does clearly revolve around Hex's quest for revenge against Turnbull, who years earlier—as payback for Hex killing his son, which was done in order to prevent the Civil War destruction of a hospital—made Hex watch his wife and son burn, and then left him with a nasty mark of Cain on his right cheek.

A subsequent flashback implies that after his face was mutilated, Hex further burned it with an axe blade to remove Turnbull's cattle brand insignia, but it's hard to tell, since Hayward's 82-minute film speeds through every scene with a squirmy restlessness that suggests it badly needs to pee. Thanks to his near-death experience at the hands of Turnbull, Hex can converse with the dead, and despite his being a former Confederate, we're informed that he wasn't a secessionist or a supporter of slavery. Whew! Commendable politics notwithstanding, though, Hex still comes off like a third-rate Man with No Name in bad '50s horror-movie makeup. Looking uncomfortable in cheek-and-mouth prosthetics that minimize his expressiveness, Brolin is reduced to lame one-liners and riding on horseback in stilted slow-mo, along the way having to listen to blather about a host of undeveloped clichéd themes (the frontier's transition into industrialized modernity, the similarity between his and Turnbull's murderous methods) while engaging in PG-13 violence that's amazingly free of actual blood, culminating with a man being killed by rotator blades without, as a follow-up image makes plain, suffering any visible injury.

Even with its fleet runtime, Hayward's paranormal western drags for stretches, including every Hex hallucination about a big red clay clearing where he does imaginary battle with Turnbull. And also, during every moment that Megan Fox, as the Feisty Whore with a Soft Spot for Hex, struts around in a lungs-crushing corset or appears in close-up, her face digitally airbrushed to resemble a newly buffed Corvette hood. Unintentional comedy inevitably arises, as when Hex—saved from gunshot wounds by faceless Native Americans—exhales ghost crows, and then a spits out a real live one, before sitting bolt upright and screaming "TURNBULL!"

Throughout, Jonah Hex is a narrative mess, too busy combining Old-West tropes with sci-fi contraptions (in a manner reminiscent of Wild Wild West), as well as racing between nonsensically matched present-past incidents and spastic fights, to bother with genuine characterizations. Thus, the proceedings fall back on defining heroes and villains through weird facial blemishes, not just burn-victim Hex but also impish neck-tattooed Irish killer Burke (a giddy, game Michael Fassbender) and Turnbull, whose bushy mustache and mutton chops seem to change appearance ever-so-slightly from one shot to the next. They're disfigured faces fit for a disfigured film.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2010/06/22/jonah-hex-reviewed-for-posterity

Jonah Hex Reviewed, for Posterity
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:00 AM

Seriously... what went wrong?

Jesse Hassenger witnessed the year's most egregious studio misfire and has come to tell of it, quickly, before we forget all about its existence the way Warner Bros. would like us to.

Jonah Hex could be shown in film school as a shining example of how shortening a movie does not necessarily make it move faster. Cut to the bone at seventy-five minutes before the credits role, this assemblage of a DC Comics adaptation grabs at every possible shortcut—intermittent narration; possible actual scenes smushed into montages; an animated origin story—yet feels, in the end, not like a quick and dirty 80-minute thriller but rather an extremely choppy 100-minute one. It's not tedious, exactly, but the shortcuts haven't saved anyone much time or effort. If anything, they hack away at a cast otherwise capable of supporting Josh Brolin's face-scarred man with a silly name: John Malkovich (as the Confederate villain!), Will Arnett (playing it straight!), Michael Fassbender (as an Irish henchman!), Aidan Quinn (as Ulysses S. Grant!), and Michael Shannon (who, judging by his onscreen "and" credit, at some point had more than a single line).

Yes, Hex is a post-Civil War semi-gothic western with a power-mad Confederate and heroes recruited by the Grant administration. Which means that perhaps the strangest thing about the movie, apart from the belief that another fifteen or twenty minutes would make the whole thing far, far worse, is the fact that Warner Brothers paid for what is essentially a serious take on Wild Wild West minus international superstar Will Smith. Secretly, I find this wrongheadedness sort of delightful: I have a weak spot for late nineteenth century America repurposed for pulp, with its corruption and manginess and fallout from the industrial revolution.

Jonah Hex is plenty mangy, with a grizzled bounty-hunting antihero who can extract key information from corpses yet keeps a variety of animal sidekicks (if you see a horse, an adorable dog, and a murder of crows together, Jonah Hex might be in town! Or possibly Sharon, Lois, and/or Bram). It's by no means a good movie; it falls into that crack between boilerplate stupidity and delirious over-the-top silliness. If it had been directed, as originally planned, by credited screenwriters Neveldine and Taylor, of the Crank series, it might've cleared the jump. But its catalog of freak occurrences (substituting for a story that would presumably be wracked with post-Civil War guilt, had it even the tiniest bit of gravity) has a ramshackle semi-steampunk sort of charm: there's a throwaway detail about how the film's doomsday MacGuffin was designed by Eli Whitney! And horse-mounted mega-guns! And an abbreviated fight with some kind of weird snake man! (Escaped from a Barnum attraction, no doubt.) It's sloppy trash for which no actors can be blamed, not even Megan Fox in her all-too-appropriate fifteen minutes as a tough prostitute, wearing hooker-red lipstick that may or may not also have been engineered by Mr. Whitney. Like everything else in this production, she's a thinly conceived gimmick providing the most momentary of diversions before inspiring a weirdly affectionate sort of pity.

http://fandomania.com/movie-review-jonah-hex/

Movie Review: Jonah Hex
Posted by Paige MacGregor

Director: Jimmy Hayward
Screenplay: Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor
Based On: DC Comics’s Jonah Hex
Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Michael Shannon, Will Arnett, Lance Reddick
Rated: PG-13

I will be the first to admit that I had unrealistic expectations for Jonah Hex, the comic-based action Western released this past weekend. Although I didn’t expect the film to do well at the box office — there was very little hype during production and the advertising campaign was meager, to say the least — I was extremely excited about the cast, which includes two actors with whom I am borderline obsessed (Megan Fox and Michael Fassbender ) as well as several others that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, specifically Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Planet Terror) and John Malkovich (Burn After Reading, Mutant Chronicles). Throw in an uncredited appearance by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen, The Losers) and you’ve described what is, in my mind at least, an outstanding cast.

Before you throw up your hands and deem my review too subjective to be of use, let me assure you that my love for the Jonah Hex cast members and the unrealistic expectations that I had entering the movie theater forced me to be more, rather than less, critical of the film. Despite every desire to tell you all of the reasons why I fell in love with Jonah Hex (most of which are entirely personal and are not based at all upon the quality of the film), I choose instead to be as objective as possible and focus on the fact that I nevertheless found the film to be rather underwhelming.

Jonah Hex begins by attempting to illustrate why the film’s protagonist transformed from a well-intentioned, honorable Confederate soldier into a physically scarred, morally ambiguous bounty hunter wanted by the government and hell bent on finding and killing whomever necessary in order to turn a profit. The sequence is well done with regard to its visuals; it uses a graphic style similar to that of Tales of the Black Freighter (2009) to give audiences a cursory look into the events that led to Hex’s striking transformation. Unfortunately, viewers are provided with only the bare minimum of what they need to know to understand the rest of the film, leaving the relationship between Jonah and his wife and son and other important character development to be fleshed out later in the film through flashback sequences, if at all.

In my opinion, the reason that critics are calling Jonah Hex disjointed and boring has more to do with the film’s lack of exposition and resulting insufficient character development (or vice versa, your choice) than it does with the fact that the movie is a Western or that it incorporates Native American magic and other supernatural elements. It is not Jonah Hex’s conversations with the dead or his surreal dream sequences that throw audiences for a loop — although those are the easiest parts to point to as justification for disliking Jonah Hex since they stand out so much from the rest of the action. Rather, it is the fact that audiences don’t know what makes any of the characters tick that poses the most severe problem for viewers. Jonah Hex simply asks too much of an audience that is given only bits and pieces of information to grasp on to.

Let’s examine Megan Fox’s character, for example. Fox plays Lilah, a prostitute that Jonah Hex appears to be involved with on an on-again, off-again basis. Promoted as Hex’s love interest, it is surprising how little Megan Fox appears onscreen during Jonah Hex. The interactions between Hex and Lilah are short and infrequent, and although their conversations and casual nature hint at a long history of involvement and mutual affection, there’s not a great deal to support the characters’ relationship (after all, if Lilah has been sleeping with Hex for an extended period of time, wouldn’t she be at least somewhat familiar with his battle scars?). By the end of the film, the audience knows virtually nothing about the prostitute other than the fact that she’s handy with both a gun and a blade and that she “ain’t much for bein’ owned.” The audience’s unfamiliarity with Lilah makes her capture and subsequent use as leverage against Jonah Hex somewhat bewildering and wholly anticlimactic. Similarly, Lilah’s absence at the end of Jonah Hex will have viewers scratching their heads, especially after watching the film’s climactic fight scene work so hard to establish the connection between Jonah and Lilah.

Lilah isn’t the only character — and Megan Fox isn’t the only actor — to suffer from a lack of development and minimal onscreen time in Jonah Hex. Both John Malkovich and Michael Fassbender are startlingly underutilized in the movie, their extensive talents squandered on two-dimensional characters that are never quite accessible to audiences. While both receive far more time onscreen than Fox, the audience is never privy to the real, underlying motivation of John Malkovich’s character, Quentin Turnbull, and viewers are allowed even less information about Fassbender’s character, Burke, than they are about Lilah. Granted, Jonah Hex provides more background on Hex than it does the others, but even his character has some severe shortcomings. For example, the makeup job on Josh Brolin makes Jonah Hex’s scarred face look fantastic on camera, but it also hinders the actor’s performance by making at least a third of his dialogue barely intelligible.

While I won’t tell you to go out and see Jonah Hex in the theaters, I will say that those of you who were already planning to go and who are content with 80 minutes of explosions (Hex never seems to leave a place without it being on fire), gun fighting, and Megan Fox in a bustier will be entertained. If you’re looking for the next big summer blockbuster, I’d look elsewhere. I hear The Karate Kid is supposed to be pretty good.

Rating: 3 / 5 Stars

http://www.jamesfrazier.biz/2010/06/602-jonah-hex-review.html

Tuesday, June 22, 2010
602 - Jonah Hex review

“Jonah Hex” is a film no one asked for, a near self-parody of movie studios' eagerness to suck up any comic property in existence and crank out a picture just because they can. Based on a DC Comics property that most comic fans have never bothered to read, there's a bored, labored air about this film from the first frame. It's as if the major players knew exactly what they got into, but had kitchens that needed remodeling, and the knowledge that new tile can cost a lot of money.

Josh Brolin plays the titular Jonah Hex, a Confederate veteran with the ability to speak to the dead. He gained this skill after a near-death experience, which begs the question, does the mean to assert that God doesn't know the difference between nearly dead and dead? Give the deity some credit, I say.

There's not a lot to Hex, who roams the country in search of bad guys, money, and vengeance for his family. One would think that the ability to talk to the dead would be conducive to interesting or even insightful scenarios, but no, he really only uses this power to track down bad guys. I have a question for police officers, bounty hunters, and other trackers out there: just how do you find someone without communicating with the dead first?

The film's villain is another ex-Confederate named General Turnbull. He's played by John Malkovich, one of contemporary cinema's greatest actors. I took his presence as a good sign, but was baffled at the lethargy present in his performance. A wild-eyed Confederate genius in the middle of a silly comic movie should present ample opportunity for a talent such a Malkovich to have some fun, but he has none, which is about as much as the audience gets, too. Where's the Malkovich of "In the Line of Fire," of "Con Air," or even "Burn After Reading?" Thinking about his kitchen, I suppose.

For that matter, just about no one's having a good time. With top billing on a big budget summer movie, Brolin seemingly knows that the material doesn't do much to pitch his name for future high-profile pictures. He dutifully reads his lines, more than I can say for Malkovich, and exits without leaving an impression. Megan Fox, much maligned, has actually done good work in “Jennifer's Body.” Here she plays the world's best looking hooker, in love with Hex for no apparent reason other than that every hero needs a love interest, and in any other film, she'd look the most bored of the entire cast. The only actor who makes anything out of his role is Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who plays a gun thug with lots of attitude and precious little screen time.

There's a story in these 80 minutes somewhere, about a WMD (yes, in the 1870's) which consists of glowing orange Nerf balls and an attack on a speech by President Ulysses S. Grant attended by approximately 20 people. It makes no sense, but then again, neither does the rationale behind this film existing in the first place.

2 out of 5

posted by James at 6/22/2010 11:46:00 AM

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

Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Review: Jonah Hex (2010)
Jonah Hex is based on a long-standing DC comics who, after having served the Confederacy in the Civil War and suffered many personal tragedies (one of which cost him roughly half his face), rides the Old West as a bounty hunter/mercenary. He's tough. He's mean. He's really good with a gun, knife or ax. And woe be unto him who tries to get around paying Jonah Hex his fee.

With decades of material to work with--especially the most recent "Jonah Hex" series written by Jimmy Palmotti and Justin Gray--making a "Jonah Hex" movie seems like a pretty good idea.

Just not this "Jonah Hex" movie.

The film is well cast, with a suitably snarly Josh Brolin as Hex; Megan Fox brings the pretty as Hex's prostitute girlfriend, Leila; and John Malkovich as Quentin Turnbull, a former Confederate general with a hate-on for Hex, and the feeling is mutual. (Hex betrayed Turnbull's son to the yankees for targeting civilian;, Turnbull in turn executed Hex's wife and child). The costumes and cinematography look about right, and the heavy-metal soundtrack by Marco Beltrami and Mastodon is oddly effective.

Why, then, does this whole movie seem off?

As with most bad movies, the problems begin with the screenplay, which reads like a rejected episode of the '60s TV series The Wild Wild West (itself the victim of a bad big-screen adaptation). Turnbull has faked his own death (to get Hex off of his trail) is leading a renegade army around the country, killing loads of innocent people and assembling a super-weapon designed by Eli Whitney, but never fully constructed...until now. President Ulysses S. Grant calls in Hex to hunt down Turnbull, interrupting the bounty hunter's me-time with Leila and leading eventually to a literally explosive confrontation.

Unlike his comic-book counterpart, though, this big-screen Jonah Hex has mystical powers, like the ability to bring the dead back to life briefly for conversation. He also has a penchant for gadgets, like Gatling guns mounted on his horse. (If that poor horse turns its head the wrong way. Jonah's gonna have to find a new ride.)

The plot raises a lot more questions than it answers, like...How does Turnbull know about the super-weapon? How does Grant know about Hex and his animosity toward Turnbull? How does Turnbull know about Leila? How does Turnbull's psychotic, heavily tattooed henchman (Michael Fassbender) get all the way to the Southwest, kidnap Leila and get all the way back so quickly? (Maybe Eli Whitney also invented the airplane?) Why do Jonah and Leila love each other? (Maybe the sex is really good?) What's up with the super-weapon's golden glowing balls? Where did Jonah Hex's mystical abilities come from?

A rewrite (or two) on the screenplay could have fixed a lot of these problems. Throw in CGI effects that would be embarrassingly bad in a SyFy Original movie and an ending so ragged and blatantly tacked on that the editors would have been tossed out of film school if they'd submitted it as a class project, though, and you've got a movie that feels a good deal more like a work print than a finished product.

the character--and the moviegoing audience--deserved better.
Posted by Adoresixtyfour at 11:19 AM

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

Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Jonah Hex
Why did I see a Hollywood summer blockbuster based on a comic about which I know absolutely nothing that had all sorts of production problems? Because I like Josh Brolin and because I think he deserves to be a star (and because I think he deserved the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "Milk" more than Heath Ledger for "The Dark Knight", except saying that out loud is heresy and so, using my better judgement, I won't type those words). As the title character - an ex soldier in the confederate army, who, after betraying his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), by refusing to follow an unethical order, has - as is typical of these situations - his house burned and family massacred and then has his face branded (literally) and is thought to be dead before being brought back to life by some helpful Native American Indians and then wandering the land seeking work as the frontier's best bounty hunter - I realized almost straight away that Josh Brolin is my generation's Robert Mitchum. And that made me realize that Josh Brolin needs to be cast in the Robert Mitchum role opposite my Official Cinematic Crush Sienna Miller in the Jane Greer role in my "Out of the Past" remake that I am currently shopping around Hollywood to utterly no avail. (I'm thinking Val Kilmer for the Kirk Douglas role. But that's not locked in.) Oddly, though, this wasn't my most enormous epiphany during "Jonah Hex", but I'll get to that later. First, the movie!

Jonah Hex has turned bounty hunter only because it is presumed that Quentin Turnbull died in a hotel fire and, thus, no all-important revenge can be had. Except, of course, Quentin Turnbull didn't die in a hotel fire. (Whoops! I meant, SPOILER ALERT!!!) Turnbull and his cohorts have their sights set on constructing (gasp!) "The Weapon" (the words of President Ulysses Grant, played with what appears to be great disinterest by Aidan Quinn) and using it to destroy the Union on its centennial celebration. Once President Grant realizes what Turnbull is up to he enlists the aid of Jonah Hex, currently a wanted man who is shacked up with the requisite hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, Lilah (Megan Fox, who is so vastly out of her element as an actress it's like watching Rick Moranis masquerade as the fourth Ghostbuster). Hex agrees to assist if only because this allows him to exact his long awaited revenge. And so it goes.

The film has a few things going for it - namely, the premise. I like the fact that it feels so much like a futuristic western that is still set in the past (and I dug seeing Washington D.C. with the Washington Monument under construction). It has an absolutely fantastic supporting performance by Michael Fassbender in the typically tame role of The Bad Guy's Main Henchman. What Fassbender does with this stock character is downright amazing. I didn't even know it was him. I stayed for the closing credits to see who the played the part and, ye gods, it was Michael Fassbender. Well done, chap. You made the movie for this viewer. It is also lean and mean, mostly forgoing superfluosness, which I contend is mandatory for action films.

Except none of it is very thrilling. The action in "Jonah Hex" is extraordinarily routine. Nothing captures the eye. Rather than sit forward with anticipation you sink into your seat, disinterested. The story can mine familiar terrain, no problem, but then the additional flourishes need to be inspired. Instead Jonah Hex flees a gigantic explosion behind him not once, not twice, not even three times, but four. Four times! Yet despite the movie's big budget blasé attitude I am so glad I bought a ticket if for the simple reason that I'm certain I discovered Hollywood's greatest unknown secret.

Megan Fox isn't real.

I'm serious. In the wake of "Jonah Hex" I am convinced Megan Fox doesn't actually exist. It's not simply that no real person could possibly act that badly but, well, look at her. Consider her discombobulatingly rail-thin waist and consider her mind-bending, uh, chest area and especially consider the way a soft light seems to emanate from her in every single shot of "Jonah Hex", a soft light you ordinarily see surrounding characters created entirely by.....CGI.

Don't you find it suspicious that Michael Bay "discovered" her? Are we postive his "discovery" wasn't him creating her in a lab? Sure, sure, there is a whole "backstory" on Wikipedia but I'm not buying it. Her first film was "Holiday in the Sun"? Please. Has anyone actually seen this? How can we not be sure Michael Bay didn't create "Holiday in the Sun" himself? How can we not be sure Michael Bay didn't create this whole "backstory". I think she was "bullied and picked on" in middle school to generate empathy. I think he became jealous of how much success his "creation" was having and, thus, invented the whole "feud" to get rid of her. But he couldn't just "kill" her so he allowed her to be used in "Jennifer's Body" (A cheerleader who has a lesbian makeout scene? You're telling me that doesn't have Michael Bay's fingerprints all over it?) and "Jonah Hex" (A prostitute in bustiers? Again, Michael Bay's fingerprints) to throw people off the scent and let her "career" die naturally. Well, you didn't fool me! Oh, I understand the risk I run of exposing this on my blog and that's why if over the next few weeks the many forced references to Sienna Miller and Lady Gaga diminish and reviews praising "The A Team" and "Toy Story 3" pop up you will know that Hollywood came and got me. That's fine. I am willing to sacrifice. Now, everyone, go tell it on the mountain before it's too late!

Megan Fox is the real life S1m0ne.

http://www.stepup21.com/movies/reviews/hollywood/jonah-hex-review/

Jonah Hex | Review
Review Score:
June 20th, 2010 at 12:55 pm -

The film directed by Jimmy Hayward, Jonah Hex is a film based on the DC Comics gunslinger and the movie has been made in the similar name. The movie follows the bounty hunter (man with a scar on his face) who is enlisted by President Ulysses S. Grant and Lt. Grass to tackle the terrorist Quentin Turnbull, a former Confederate official who is very much thirsty of obliterating the U.S. government. Along with this there is another fact to add heat to the revenge of Hex to Turnbull. He has to counter act to Turnbull for slaying his wife and child and the real reason behind the scar on his face. Hex has to close those accounts along with the protection of the government. The story progresses on the same line with an average attempt of entertaining the fans especially the youngsters.
The movie was in the exploding pace in the box office for the weekend or for the first three days and it could not keep the same pace in competing with the other same time movies. It struggles to compete with other movies now. The movie could have made records if done in the right level but it was loaded with a lot of chaos and unnecessary mess. It seems the movie lacks a uniform vision from its beginning till the end and it was concentrating on a lot of things to satisfy different category. It is messed with complicated relationships, supernatural elements, action, black comedy, etc and thus the movie can not be termed as any one of these. Jonah’s supernatural power is one of the few things that make this movie different, but that too not in the complete sense. The very same thing creates an impression of wearing half pants instead of pants in certain areas. The sound effects create another mess from the very beginning when the logo of Production Company appears till the end of the movie.

The cast of the movie: Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex, John Malkovich as Quentin Turnbull, Megan Fox as Tallulah ‘Lilah’ Black, Michael Fassbender as Burke, Will Arnett as Lieutenant Grass, Lance Reddick as Smith, John Gallagher, Jr. as Lieutenant Evan, Tom Wopat as Colonel Slocum, Wes Bentley as Adelman Lusk and Aidan Quinn as Ulysses S. Grant.
Josh Brolin is really a good actor and most of the time he is on the screen with fantastic performance that make the fans almost forget all the hateful, and hopeless parts of the movie. The movie would be a great success if made with out much chaos. But at this point it can be given two and half scores out of five.

http://ramascreen.com/jonah-hex-review/

JONAH HEX Review
Posted by Rama On June - 19 - 2010

Jonah Hex
GRADE: 1 out of 5

Wow! This movie is catastrophic! It’s a mess from start to finish. It’s basically 80 minutes of Heavy Metal music video. Ya know that awful feeling you got after watching Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Nic Cage’s Ghost Rider,… like you’ve been cheated, like the movie could’ve been so much fun and yet they were choppy, inconsistent, confusing, seemingly badass but they were tame.. that’s JONAH HEX for you. This is one summer movie that shouldn’t have been made at all.

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 Leila (Megan Fox), whose life in a brothel has left her with scars of her own. But 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 (John Malkovich). 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. Based on the legendary graphic novel, “Jonah Hex” is an epic adventure thriller about one man’s personal quest for redemption against the vast canvas of the battle between good and evil.

I’m not sure who to blame for this. The crazy guys behind Crank films, Neveldine/Taylor did have involvement in the story, so you can definitely tell their style in JONAH HEX. The movie actually doesn’t help those who never read the comic book to fully understand the character other than his family was killed, his face was scarred, he developed supernatural power and the only thing keeping him going is his thirst for revenge. But put that aside, because as an action movie, JONAH HEX fails on just about every level.

The fight choreography and the gunfight sequences aren’t creative, let alone interesting. The villain’s intention is generic and what the hell is up with those orange Dragonball-esque explosives?! If that’s their definition of wow factor, if that’s supposed to impress me, then I’m out the door faster than you can say lame. It’s not as cheesy as Will Smith’s Wild Wild West but it might as well be.

Turnbull’s right hand man, Irish psycho Burke played by Michael Fassbender might have something going there for a moment but even he is too crazy to be likeable. It’s an action film that insults our intelligence. Just like your typical Neveldine/Taylor movie, you’d have to have a serious case of A-D-D to actually enjoy such phony entertainment.

The part I really hate is.. and I don’t understand why director Jimmy Hayward chose this method.. presenting another realm alongside the battle that’s currently going on. What I’m trying to say is.. during the scene in which Hex tries to stop Turnbull’s evil masterplan, we keep getting thrown back and forth into this other weird scenario of Hex in a fistfight, duel to the death with Turnbull, out in the middle of nowhere. Like I said earlier, JONAH HEX is more or less a heavy metal music video and that what that fist fight scene implies. Kinda like watching a brainless version of Natural Born Killers.

Because of its inability to be creative, JONAH HEX settles for easy explosions every single time.

I’ve never read the comic book so I can’t compare Josh Brolin’s performance to the original material but I can say this much, this movie is not Brolin’s fault, it’s not Malkovich’s fault either. Although Brolin’s scarred face does make it a bit hard for us to understand his speeches. We can still hate Megan Fox’s acting, that’s probably never going to change. But JONAH HEX, in its attempt to give you a blast, neglects many things that action fans desire and so the result is not only less than satisfying, it’s a complete disaster.

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

Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex is a wild-west action movie with some supernatural and science fiction elements, and it is safe to say that it failed on every one of those levels. It was almost as if director Jimmy Hayward and writing duo Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor purposely made this movie as bad as possible. The film is only about 80 minutes long, but the boring narrative, terrible writing, and repetitive, incoherent action sequences do all they can to make sure you’re counting down every second until the film is over.

The story follows Jonah Hex, a former soldier seeking revenge on the man who killed his family and left him for dead. Through his near-death experience, he gained the ability to speak with the dead. This concept could have made for an interesting supernatural twist on a classic western story, but instead, it just adds to the stupidity of the entire thing. Throughout the movie, we are subjected to increasingly ridiculous plot points and set pieces to the point where you’re numb to anything that happens to these characters. For example, the bad guy plans to use a giant cannon to destroy the capital of the United States. This is presented in such an absurd manner that you can’t help but laugh.

The only positive thing about the movie is Josh Brolin. Brolin is a very talented actor, and it’s clear that he’s trying as hard as he can to get through the train wreck that is this movie. Same goes with John Malkovich and Michael Fassbender, both very talented actors who don’t deserve to be in a movie this bad. Megan Fox, on the other hand, seems right at home amongst the awfulness. Fox has a very limited acting range that is amplified only by the terrible dialogue that the actors are forced to spew through their mouths. She is obviously only used as eye-candy to get teenage boys into the theater, but judging by the movie’s utter failure at the American box office, her looks are not the draw the studio is hoping they’ll be.

Jonah Hex is a terrible movie through and through, with no redeeming qualities to speak of. The film is so short that you’re left feeling cheated out of your money, and it’s so empty that you’ll forget about it in just a few days. Do yourself a favor and skip this one.
F
Posted by Rachel writes Toruk at 10:46 AM

http://www.biffbampop.com/2010/06/scotty-g-gets-hexed-by-jonah-hex.html

Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Scotty G Gets Hexed By Jonah Hex

I should start off by saying that I have never read any Jonah Hex comic books. In the interest of fairness, I can say that I never knew that the character existed until the film went into production. While I don’t read comic books, I love comic book movies, so I went to see Jonah Hex on Saturday. What I experienced was a film that is not as bad as everyone says it is, but by no stretch of the imagination is the film good.

The opening starts out with a voice-over narration by Jonah Hex over scenes from Civil War battles that Hex and his men fought. Immediately, my interest in the film evaporated as the writing for the narration is so poor, and the images that accompany it are so incoherent that I knew I was in for a rough evening. Essentially, Hex fought for the Confederacy, but got upset by his commanding officer’s orders to kill innocent people and blow up a hospital, so he betrayed his unit and saved the innocent people and the hospital. His commanding officer is Quentin Turnbull (who is played by John Malkovich), and in Hex’s efforts to save the hospital, Hex ends up killing Turnbull’s brother. This event is never memorably shown on film, which is annoying, as film is a visual medium, so make these moments stand out. Turnbull seeks revenge, and kills Hex’s wife and son while making Hex watch his family burn to death. Turnbull then brands Hex’s face with “QT”, and leaves him. Hex cuts off part of his face, as he would rather appear grossly disfigured then have “QT” on the side of his face. Hex is near death and is saved by some Indians. When he is saved by the Indians, he also gains the ability to talk to dead people for short periods of time by touching them, which brings them back to life momentarily, and only Hex can see this. That’s the setup for the film, and although I admit that I’m not the best writer, if you’re not interested in Jonah Hex by that paragraph, then you definitely will not be interested in the film.

The opening feels wrong as when Hex is about to see his wife and son killed, we get an animated sequence which leads to the title shot (again, and I know I sound like a disturbed person here), I would rather see more images of the house burning down with Hex’s family in it, then an animated sequence that takes me to the main plot. Maybe the filmmakers were showing their creativity of how they could get from “Point A” to “Point B”, but I thought it failed. Whether the animated sequence was planned or not, it seemed to me that no one liked what was shot, so we had to get a short animated sequence to take us to the main plot of the movie. This is a minor point, as that is only about 60 seconds of the movie, but the opening sequence didn’t engage me, and my interest in the film suffered.

The main plot follows Turnbull in his attempt to terrorize the centennial of the U.S. and Hex tries to stop him. There is a lot wrong with Jonah Hex, so I’m going to give some of my thoughts on the different areas of the film.

The Writing – the story is very weak, and you don’t care about a lot of what is happening on the screen. The script jumps from sequence to sequence without an explanation of what you just saw and the dialogue of Hex’s sarcastic one liners do not work. They illicit more groans than laughs. There are two animal friends that Hex has: a horse and a god. The horse I could understand, but the dog was pointless. Why did the writer’s include them? The use of flashbacks do not help the film, and I think it would have been better if they just followed the events in a natural timeline. There is never any real tension created in the film, and by the time the third act starts, you are just waiting for the credits to roll. Speaking of which, the epilogue to the film is completely forced and unconvincing. I just don’t think the writers knew how to end it. I’m sure the ending we saw was a re-shoot, so they were probably under the gun to get something done.

The Direction – This is also not a strong point. Jimmy Hayward is the director and he has primarily worked on animated films (like Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Robots, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo). He directed Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who!, and is actually an inspired choice as you think the animation background, where you can let your imagination run wild would benefit a comic book film. Unfortunately, I did not think it worked out in the end. The one sequence that comes to mind to help describe what was wrong with the direction is mid-way through the film when Hex is having a vision of fighting Turnbull in a scene where the colours make you think you are having an acid trip. It didn’t work, it was forced, and I never like it when the protagonist and antagonist actually have a fist fight before the final battle. Don’t get me wrong, the hero and villain can have shoot-outs at any point in the film, but I don’t like it when they are face-to-face fighting each other (the only time I think this worked was in Heat when DeNiro and Pacino are talking to each other in a restaurant. Michael Mann was smart enough to have them have a verbal battle, and not a fist fight). It also didn’t help when this vision returned during the final battle. It was just completely unnecessary. The pacing for the film is all wrong, as we start with the awful narration, and a truly underwhelming opening. I think they should have just started it with the death of Hex’s family, or even the first major sequence of Hex trying to collect on a bounty. The way the film is now; there is not much punch to it. The climatic battle is also disappointing, especially when things blow up, as it seemed to me we got a longer shot of the characters being under water, when we should be seeing things explode on screen. That’s not to say that all the action sequences were bad, as I generally liked the train robbery sequence, and thought it was well executed, as there was a genuine sense of excitement as I didn’t know what was going to happen on screen, so it’s not all negative.

Acting – It’s hard to be critical of the actors because the material they are given is not very strong. Josh Brolin does the most with what he is given, and seems to be having fun in the role. I do have a complaint in that sometimes you cannot understand what Jonah Hex is saying because he mumbles a lot. That could be because of the make-up for his disfigured face, but I thought it was hard to understand, which caused some of the one-liners to go right over my head, and make me ask “What did he just say?” (I could also just have bad hearing). John Malkovich gives the most disappointing performance in the film as he just seems to be going through the motions. His Quentin Turnbull is not menacing or scary, and you don’t care for his plot to destroy the centennial. It honestly feels like he hit a point when filming, when he realized that this film was going to be a flop and he stopped trying. I hate to say that because I like Malkovich, but he has done a lot better work. It’s unfair to criticize Megan Fox, as her character is hardly in the film, and she is not given much to do on-screen. I would like Fox to be given the chance to take on a role with more substance to see what she can do with it. I even thought Jennifer’s Body was more about the Amanda Seyfried character than Fox’s. I think people who bash Fox’s performance just do it because they don’t like her acting in her previous films. She gets a pass from me on this one, but I hope her next film called Passion Play gives her a chance to show her acting skills. I think that film will be a good take on whether she is going to last in this industry or not. The actor who is the biggest delight on-screen is Jeffrey Dean Morgan who makes a cameo appearance. He plays Quentin Turnbull’s dead brother that Hex killed, and his sequence actually breathes some life into the film. The cast is pretty decent as Michael Shannon, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Wes Bentley and Aidan Quinn but again they are not given much to do.

Make-Up – I really did like the look of Jonah Hex’s face, and thought they did an excellent job on it.

Special Effects – In two words: not good. Some stuff is blatant CGI (the epilogue, the energy source for the machine) and sticks out like a sore thumb. Anything that was shot live-action did work for the most part, and I think it would have been appropriate to only perform actual stunts in a western (even if this western does have machine guns).

Overall, Jonah Hex is not a good film. It runs at 1h20m, and you feel the film is so short because they edited a lot of material out, which gives the film that choppy, incoherent feel. You can tell when you watch the film that it underwent re-shoots and re-writes, because it can be a mess at times with different ideas and directions for the film battling each other. I think there is a better film in the making, and you have a good foundation with Josh Brolin in the lead role. The script needs to sharper, the one-liners need to be funnier, and the order of events might need to be moved around, but there is potential in the franchise (that I doubt we will ever see again). I would love to see or read a copy of the original script to see what could have been, but in the meantime, I would pass on seeing Jonah Hex.

Until next time!
Posted by Jean-Paul Fallavollita at 10:49:00 AM

http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/jonah_hex

Jonah Hex (PG-13)
Ken Hanke | 06/23/2010
Genre: Comic-Based Supernatural Western
Directed by: Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who)
Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Michael Shannon, Aidan Quinn

They should have just called it Jonah Hexed and been done with it. This misbegotten movie seems like a compendium of bad ideas and worse execution. Look at this thing. First you take a comic book that’s at best on the B list—probably more like the C list. Then you cast a critically solid, but far from box-office name as your star (Josh Brolin). Then you saddle him with Megan Fox for a romantic lead. As if this weren’t enough, you hire a director with zero experience on this type of project. You wimp out and go for a PG-13 rating, and then you position it against Toy Story 3. Had it been available to him, Max Bialystock in The Producers (1968) would have opted for this as his guaranteed flop rather than Springtime for Hitler.

The truth is that it’s not so much bad as it’s just completely negligible—and it didn’t need to be. The basic premise is sound enough. A vengeance-seeking Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter, Jonah Hex (Brolin), is a good basis for an anti-hero. His disfigurement at the hands of his obviously unhinged and terminally mean nemesis, Turnbull (John Malkovich), adds to the dark tone—as does the gilding-the-lily touch of having Hex further disfigure himself rather than live with Turnbull’s brand. The supernatural element is a little more troublesome, since Hex’s ability to palaver with dead folks is not exactly convincingly established. Still, this is when the film is at its most interesting. Yes, the effects—especially the CGI crows—are less than whelming, but the supernatural segments are the closest thing to style the film has to offer. They’re also the primary thing that captures any sense of a comic book.

Apart from the backstory, the plot is on the skimpy side. In essence, the supposedly dead Turnbull isn’t actually dead. Rather, he is behind a terrorist plot (how trendy) to destroy the U.S. with some super weapon (ostensibly cooked up by a post-cotton gin Eli Whitney) the U.S. decided was too horrible to ever use against humankind. Why didn’t the U.S. just destroy the damned thing and the plans? Well, good God, there’s little enough plot as it is. Anyway, President Grant (Aidan Quinn sporting the most lamentably sparse Ulysses S. Grant whiskers in the history of lamentably sparse spinach) figures that Jonah Hex is just the man to stop the madman terrorist. Except for the really dreary romantic scenes between Hex and hooker girlfriend Lily (the ever-grating Megan Fox), the whole film consists of Hex trying to prevent Turnbull’s evil scheme.

How thin is it? I went to the 12:25 p.m. show. I checked my phone at 1:36 and wondered how this non-story could possibly drag on for another 45 minutes or so. The answer was that it couldn’t. Fifteen minutes later it was over and done with—and I can’t say I was sorry.

While there’s very little that’s actually right with the film, the real culprit here is Jimmy Hayward. If style were rated on a 1-to-10 numerical scale, Hayward would rank somewhere around minus 20. I honestly cannot recall a more perfunctory job of directing. He seems to have shot exactly what was on the page—with no flourish, no embellishment, no sense of fun. If a thing blows up, it blows up in one boring shot from one boring angle. An entire town being blown up ought to be chilling or exciting or anything. Here it just happens. The screenplay by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor isn’t deathless prose, but it offered possibilities for a certain cinematic joie de vivre and there’s none here.

Bottom line: I don’t mind that I sat through it, but I’d never bother sitting through it again, and I certainly don’t recommend wasting money on it. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, disturbing images and sexual content.

http://moviecriticnextdoor.com/blogs/moviecriticnd/jonah_hex

Jonah Hex
Published June 22, 2010, 10:59 am | by MovieCriticND

I went to see a movie this weekend, really. It was only 80 minutes long, but it was still a movie. But it was just kind of... there. I watched, I understood what was going on -- not that it was difficult -- but afterwards most of it started drifting slowly out of my head. It'll never reach the point of that movie whose title I can never remember, because it least it had some visually interesting moments, but I'm still left wondering exactly what I paid $7.50 to see.

Now, I was a comic-book-reading kid when at least one of the Jonah Hex comic book incarnations was around, but I wasn't allowed to read them. My sister would lend me most of her comics, but she said those were too scary and violent for me. And she was right -- I snuck them while she was away (sorry, sis), because I was a kid and compelled to read everything I wasn't supposed to read, and they gave me nightmares.

In the movie, Jonah Hex, aka Josh Brolin of American Gangster, talks to dead people. Actually, dead people also try to kill him while he's talking to them, which leads to some awkward moments. He didn't do that in the comics I read, and it's just as well. If he had, I might still be in therapy. Anyway, they redid his origin to an extent, though his history all rushes by so fast it was almost hard to tell. John Malkovich was there and did bad things, I know that much. He plays Quentin Turnbull, who was Hex's commanding officer when they were in the Confederate Army. But Turnbull, alas, went completely off the reservation, and when Hex didn't follow gleefully, Turnbull got mad. In the ensuing chaos, Turnbull's son, Jeb (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Losers, who had the sense to remain uncredited and who I totally didn't recognize under that big beard; plus he was dead and all) gets killed, and it's all Jonah's fault. So Turnbull Sr. kills the wife and child that Jonah never had in the comics and marks Jonah's face with a branding iron. Yikes.

Jonah becomes a bounty hunter, though he also seems to have a price on his own head, so I'm not sure how that works. Considering they show him having to kill people just to get the bounty, it's probably always a little awkward. It would be like Jesse James turning in the Dalton Brothers to the sheriff. Anyway, Jonah thinks that Turnbull is dead, killed in a hotel fire; and even though it's almost impossible to get him to believe anything during the rest of the movie, for some reason he believes that. But of course he isn't dead, because you don't hire John Malkovich to appear in only the first five minutes of a movie. Not only is he not dead, he has a really big gun. I mean, A Really Big Gun. It's like something from the Wild Wild West TV series, only bigger and scarier because they have much more special effects capability. There might be napalm involved, but there's more than just that going on.

President Grant (Aidan Quinn), overlooking the unfortunate price on Jonah's head, sends him after his nemesis, since entire squadrons of soldiers haven't gotten anywhere. Turnbull, figuring that what worked once will work again, sends one of his henchmen, Burke (Michael Fassbender of Inglourious Basterds, and wow, I hate typing that misspelling), to find out who Hex loves. That would be a prostitute named Lilah (Megan Fox), who works in the worst brothel the west has ever seen. Just anyone can wander up to her room and try to kill her, and no one seems to care.

Except Hex, of course. The rest of the movie is a blur of people fighting, being captured, shooting the Really Big Gun, and generally flailing around. Lance Reddick (Agent Broyles of Fringe) shows up as Smith -- that isn't his name, it's his job; or maybe it's both -- but since he has about five lines, that isn't much fun. None of it is much fun. It was quieter, so probably better than dealing with the screaming kids at Toy Story 3, but not by much. I mean, I don't go to the movies to sleep.

Two out of five. Sorry, DC, but I'm afraid that's the best I can do. Just don't treat Doom Patrol this way, or you and I will have to have words.

http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992912064194596&ShowArticle_ID=11022306103851126

Issue #23.25 :: 06/23/2010 - 06/29/2010
Jonah Hex Resurrects, Pillages Wild Wild West

Brolin shines, but rest of stellar cast is wasted.

BY JAMES SCOTT

Jonah Hex: Did I remember to turn the oven off when I left?

It seems like every other movie is based on an old TV show or comic book I've never seen. Sometimes I feel ill-qualified to judge whether it's successfully captured the essence of the original.
Sometimes it doesn't matter.
This week, it's Jonah Hex, adapted from a comic book I've never heard of.

Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a Confederate veteran who, following the war, betrays former a ally, Quentin Turbull (John Malkovich), who continues waging war by terror, believing he can still destroy the Union with shock-and-awe attacks. In a hurried prologue, we learn how Turnbull murdered Jonah's family and left Jonah horribly burned, then apparently died, leaving Jonah no target for revenge. But President Grant (Aidan Quinn) sends word to Jonah that Turnbull might be alive and have control of a weapon of mass destruction that would enable him to achieve his goal: the dissolution of the United States and the resurrection of the Confederacy.

Jonah is no stranger to resurrection. When he touches a corpse, he can reanimate it long enough for it to be interrogated. This is good, as wherever Jonah goes, most people get killed before they have time to utter a word. Probably the best scenes, at least the most atmospheric, involve Jonah's use of his power, although I do like Oscar-nominee Brolin, who here seems to be very amusingly channeling Clint Eastwood's classic Man With No Name (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly).

When you have a hero who doesn't talk much, somebody else needs to, but Malkovich has nothing to do or say that hasn't been done or said by scores of other villains. Megan Fox, as a prostitute with a heart (or possibly some other body part) of gold, who doesn't mind Jonah's disfigurement, seems completely superfluous. Director Jimmy Hayward completely wastes fine actors like Wes Bentley, Will Arnett and Michael Shannon, with Michael Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds) having the best role in the film as a chipper Irish assassin.

And I could swear I've seen this movie before. Oh, I did: It's the same plot as Barry Sonnenfeld's and Will Smith's 1999 take on Wild Wild West, except villain Kenneth Brannagh at least got to ham it up. The plot is more timely now than it was in 1999, as much of Turnbull's anger towards Washington is disturbingly reminiscent of modern Tea Party sentiment, particularly when it invokes a preference for "Second Amendment remedies" over election and legislation.

There are a lot of elements here that I appreciate — especially Brolin's dead-on-target performance and the fact that anybody has the cannonballs to make a period piece like this — but there's an inherent weakness in the film that's hard to pinpoint. Director Hayward — ironically, as Toy Story 3 opens opposite Jonah Hex, a former Pixar animator — favors rapid transitions from scene to scene, but it gets tedious, making me want a slow dissolve somewhere. Even within individual sequences, there's something missing so that there seems an uneven progression from A to B, almost as if the movie were a rough cut that's not quite finished, except it is.

Jonah Hex is different enough to make it mildly interesting, and its concept almost good enough to make you wish they'd give it one more try. Except this is probably the best story it can tell. Hayward might wish he'd stayed at Pixar.

http://uweekly.com/newsmag/06-23-2010/14866/wild-wild-blech

Wild wild blech
'Jonah Hex' knocks itself out in the early rounds

By VR Bryant
It's really unfortunate when, somewhere within the production process, a film loses whatever charm or intrigue it might at one point have had. "Jonah Hex," the latest in a seemingly endless string of adaptations of comic books that nobody gives a sh-t about (see: "The Losers"), suffers that very fate.

After having snooped around a bit to see what source material justified such a gaudy expenditure of time and money, my curiosity was adequately piqued - a deadeye bounty hunter, cursed by the Apache, tools around the Old West being a general badass and doling out vigilante justice.

Rocket science it is not, but having very recently been swept up by the recent Rockstar title for the XBOX, "Red Dead Redemption," I liked the idea of a little pseudo-supernatural gunslinging and tomahawk tossing. The presence of Josh Brolin ("No Country for Old Men") and John Malkovich did nothing but encourage my enthusiasm.

What I had not anticipated (still a little gullible around the edges, I guess), was how unlikely it was that anyone in this picture would give a damn about making it any good. Some seemingly innocuous liberties taken with the storyline turned out to torpedo the emotional undercurrent and suck all credibility out of Malkovich's villain role.

What you end up with is a tawdry and completely forgettable jaunt into an awkward, patchwork world with awkward, patchwork characters. To say that it is entirely without merit is neither fair nor accurate; to say that it does not compare favorably with wannabe-steam punk stinker "Wild Wild West" (1999) is both fair and accurate.

In fact, the parallels are shockingly plentiful - one would have thought that the desire to avoid such an unfortunate association would have been powerful enough to prevent it. One would have been wrong, I suppose. From the Civil War hooey to the ho-hum "doomsday" military technology, to the token babe in a bustle (I'll take Salma Hayek over Megan Fox any day), it too often felt shallow and unnecessary.

Loping elsewhere around this near-disaster are several otherwise-reputable actors, such as Lance Reddick ("The Wire"), Wes Bentley ("American Beauty") and Will Arnett. But not a one of them is ever given the opportunity to be anything more than a two-dimensional prop. Malkovich seems disinterested, and the lone bright spot, Michael Fassbender ("Inglorious Bastards") just isn't on screen enough to make a difference.

The low point - and I know I'm piling on, but it's true - is the presence of Megan Fox here as the hooker with a heart of gold. The interplay between her and Brolin is worth precisely one single line, a B-minus chuckler that left as quickly as it arrived. Surprised?

Like so many movies anymore, this is a niche production, meant for teenage boys with razor-thin attention spans and no broader ambitions than to ogle Fox's knockers. The fact that "Hex" is over in just 81 minutes is proof of that. We can't all be critics, I guess.

http://wcfcourier.com/entertainment/movies/article_1b063536-7fa9-11df-ac6e-001cc4c03286.html

Superwho?: Little-known comic book hero fails to impress in 'Hex'

By JAMES FRAZIER, newsroom@wcfcourier.com | Posted: Thursday, June 24, 2010 2:00 pm
'Jonah Hex' review

Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox

Director: Jimmy Hayward

Run time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

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

Now playing at: Crossroads,College Square

2 out of 5 stars

"Jonah Hex" is a film no one asked for, a near self-parody of movie studios' eagerness to suck up any comic property in existence and crank out a picture just because they can. Based on a DC book that most comic fans have never bothered to read, there's a bored, labored air about this film from the first frame.

Josh Brolin plays the titular Jonah Hex, a Confederate veteran with the ability to speak to the dead, a skill he gained after a near-death experience.

There's not a lot to Hex, who roams the country in search of bad guys, money and vengeance for his family. One would think that the ability to talk to the dead would be conducive to interesting or even insightful scenarios, but no, he really only uses this power to track down bad guys. I have a question for police officers, bounty hunters and other trackers out there: Just how do you find someone without communicating with the dead first?

The film's villain is another ex-Confederate named General Turnbull. He's played by John Malkovich, one of contemporary cinema's greatest actors. I took his presence as a good sign but was baffled by the lethargy present in his performance. A wild-eyed Confederate genius in the middle of a silly comic movie should present ample opportunity for a talent such a Malkovich to have some fun, but he has none, which is about as much as the audience gets, too.

For that matter, just about no one's having a good time. With top billing on a big budget summer movie, Brolin seemingly knows that the material doesn't do much to pitch his name for future high-profile pictures. He dutifully reads his lines, more than I can say for Malkovich, and exits without leaving an impression. Megan Fox, much maligned, has actually done good work in "Jennifer's Body." Here she plays the world's best-looking hooker, in love with Hex for no apparent reason other than that every hero needs a love interest. The only actor who makes anything out of his role is Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who plays a gun thug with lots of attitude and precious little screen time.

There's a story somewhere in these 80 minutes somewhere, about a WMD (yes, in the 1870s) and an attack on a speech by President Ulysses S. Grant attended by approximately 20 people. It makes no sense, but then again, neither does the rationale behind this film existing in the first place.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/24/1698469/the-movie-masochist-the-stink.html

Posted on Thursday, 06.24.10

The Movie Masochist: The stink stays in the picture

By JAMES FRANKLIN
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Because anything ever printed on a comic-book page is now considered viable movie material, you have to dread the day studios start building summer epics around ads for sea monkeys, X-ray glasses and Charles Atlas muscle-building guides once the pantheon of characters is finally exhausted.

Until then we have "Jonah Hex," a fantasy-Western built around a lesser-known character in the DC Comics universe that's been kicking around since the early 1970s, despite occasional cancellations. The frequency with which the name "Jonah Hex" is uttered, however, leaves the impression the movie began life as a drinking game.

"Jonah Hex" was dogged by rumors of disaster long before its release. Those whisperings must have started among those who read the final screenplay, which is partially credited to a pair of writers listed as "Neveldine and Taylor" - a joint moniker that suggests they abandoned careers as a soft rock duo before dabbling in movies.

Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is a former Confederate soldier who roams post-Civil War America killing bad guys for little fun or profit. He still wears his tattered uniform, a clothing choice that, combined with his disfigured face and gaping cheek hole, gives the fleeting impression that both the man and the outfit were badly chewed by moths. Hex and the sweaty supporting characters give off such air of uncleanliness that "Jonah Hex" may be the first comic-book adaptation that makes you want to cover your nose and mouth with a clean handkerchief.

Actually, the movie's attention to both historic and unhygienic detail is one of its unexpected strengths. The scruffy facial hair, yellow teeth and lived-in look of the clothes give the movie a fascinating texture that its bare-bones narrative hardly deserves, creating a peculiar experience that's simultaneously tactile and brain-numbing.

A haphazard prologue tells us Hex has supernatural powers because he was generously revived from death by Crow medicine men who hadn't yet heard of managed care. Being a near-corpse for a brief time allows Hex to communicate with the dead, no matter how bad their state of decomposition. Another uncanny Hex trait is his magical resistance to vomiting, seen in his ability to open long-buried coffins without being sickened by the pent-up gases inside.

The story, or what's left after some rumored heavy editing, has Hex seeking revenge on his former commander, an ex-Confederate general who killed Hex's family and burned his face with a branding iron. Villainous Gen. Turnbull (John Malkovich) has devoted his postwar career to destroying the Union and whacking people hard with his eagle-topped cane. A stern and worried Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) hires Hex to stop Turnbull, allowing Hex to get revenge and be a federal employee. Hex talks to some dead guys, spends time with an implausibly empowered prostitute (Megan Fox) and kills a bunch of people before sending Turnbull to his final reward. The Union is saved, leaving Grant to enjoy more mundane problems like the Teapot Dome scandal.

"Jonah Hex" gives its unexpectedly strong cast - Brolin, Malkovich, Quinn, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett and Michael Shannon - little to do except mutter threats and declaim in a florid 19th-century manner. Scenes end abruptly with Hex riding hither and yon, accompanied by a very personable dog. If one day Warner Bros. executives find themselves franchise-poor, they could build a lasting series around this dog. With his flattened ears and wolfish grin, he could carry a movie as ineptly written as "Jonah Hex" because he'd need no lines.

Rated PG-13 for violence and suggestions of 19th-century aromas.

One star. Lousy.

The Movie Masochist is an emotionally wounded cinephile who lives in the United States. He watches bad movies so you don't have to.

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/jun/24/cartoon-like-hombre-mangled-by-enemies-acting-and/

Cartoon-like hombre mangled by enemies, acting and editing

By Scott A. May

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Megan Fox and Josh Brolin star in a scene from “Jonah Hex.”

To call “Jonah Hex” one of the summer’s biggest bombs would presume high expectations, and I, for one, never saw this stinker coming until it was too late to duck.
‘Jonah Hex’

★ out of 5 stars

Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan

Fox

Director: Jimmy Hayward

Rating: PG-13 for violence, language,

sexuality

Theaters: Stadium 14, Forum 8

Directed by Jimmy Hayward (“Horton Hears a Who”), the movie was adapted from a 1970s DC Comics character created by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga, and although it enjoyed a lengthy run, the series remained obscure. This movie should seal that fate.

Set in the post-Civil War era, Josh Brolin gets saddled with the title character, a former Confederate soldier who disobeyed orders from his commander, Gen. Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), saving many innocent lives at the cost of Turnbull’s only son.

Enraged, Turnbull and his right-hand man, Burke (Michael Fassbender), force Hex to watch as they burn down his house — with his wife and son inside. They then brand his face with the initials QT, which Hex later removes with a red-hot tomahawk, resulting in an even more grotesquely mangled mug.

Hex works as a bounty hunter but is enlisted by President Ulysses Grant (Aidan Quinn) to stop Turnbull from unleashing his secret weapon on the world. Megan Fox receives star billing for her minor role as a tough prostitute named Lilah, the only person Hex lets get next to him.

I love the idea of Jonah Hex but absolutely hate what they did with it. The action scenes are badly edited, set to a completely out-of-place heavy metal soundtrack, topped with bloodless PG-13 violence. Hayward directs with a generic sense of style, blowing a unique opportunity to create a new blend of screen hero.

Brolin looks embarrassed, as well he should be, forced to grunt his lines through ridiculous face putty — dude, cut that thing off. Malkovich saddens me with paycheck performances like this, and Fox is only around for eye candy, something I must admit this movie sorely needs.

Clocking in at a brisk 80 minutes, the best thing you can say about this movie is that it’s over quickly. It’s fast-paced and honestly rarely boring, just horrendously stupid. “Jonah Hex” doesn’t just bomb — it takes 80 minutes of your life with it, and that’s just cruel.

http://blog.reelloop.com/11349/news/jonah-hex-barely-movie/

‘Jonah Hex’ is Barely a Movie
Comic Book Adaptation is a Front-Runner for the Worst of the Summer
Posted by Patrick Bromley on June 23, 2010

Watching the new film Jonah Hex, an adaptation of the DC comic book that ran primarily in the ’70s and ’80s, I began to feel bad for just about everyone involved. This couldn’t have been the movie anyone thought they were making when they signed up, or even when they finished shooting. It’s clearly a case of a movie made by studio editors, attempting to salvage something that perhaps could not have been salvaged. At just over 70 minutes (before the end credits), it’s barely a movie — just a series of half-scenes and plot beats strung together in the most rushed way possible. Warner Bros., having already invested roughly $50 million and staked out a release date, clearly decided that they needed to put something in theaters. That’s pretty much all that can be said in defense of Jonah Hex: that it is something that is playing in theaters. For now, anyway.

Josh Brolin stars as the titular Hex, a confederate soldier who betrays his best friend (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, in one of what amounts to the movie’s endless parade of cameos), and, as punishment, is hideously scarred and forced to watch as his family is murdered by the man’s father, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, the very definition of phoning it in). Beaten and left for dead, Jonah is revived by Native American magic that leaves him between the worlds of the living and the dead, able to communicate with corpses simply by laying hands on them. Now a professional bounty hunter dedicated to his own brand of justice, Hex is enlisted by President Grant (Aidan Quinn) to track down Turnbull and stop him from unleashing a new “ultimate weapon” capable of laying waste to the entire world. At least, I think that’s what happens — though I neglected to mention Michael Fassbender as a giddy Irish assassin and Megan Fox as a prostitute in love with Jonah Hex. The entire cast, which also includes Wes Bentley (proving he can be in a comic book movie worse than Ghost Rider), Will Arnett, Michael Shannon and Lance Reddick (Lieutenant Daniels!), is ridiculously overqualified and hardly used at all.

Fighting for screentime amidst the plot — if you can even call it that — are goofy touches like an animated sequence (which gives Hex’s entire origin in the first three minutes), a guy who spits snake venom, a bunch of crows and an inexplicable red-tinted sequence in which Hex imagines himself taking care of unfinished business. They’re batshit crazy touches leftover from a more ambitious movie (the script was written by Crank-makers Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine, who specialize in batshit), and though I tend to like batshit crazy (I’ve enjoyed all of Richard Kelly’s movies, if that says anything), Jonah Hex isn’t even allowed the conviction of its own eccentricities. Brolin’s Hex is the only thing in the movie that comes close to working; you can see the broad outline of a character there, and you can almost see what it was that drew Brolin to the part. Still, all the soul has been stripped away in the editing, leaving nothing but an actor grumbling one-liners through a cumbersome prosthetic.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Jonah Hex is Once Upon a Time in America or that director Jimmy Hayward is Sergio Leone. In fact, Hayward, whose only previous credit is the animated Horton Hears a Who!, is a big part of the problem with Hex; he doesn’t seem capable of finding a consistent tone and doesn’t show much knack for where to place and move the camera for maximum impact. In fact, I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is rumored to have been brought in to oversee some extensive reshoots on the film, but it’s not as if you can tell what those might be in the finished product — no scene works well enough to be demonstratively the work of a better filmmaker. Ultimately, though, none of the work done by anyone makes any difference; it’s all been gutted down to the bare, incoherent minimum, as though Warner Bros. is visibly embarrassed and just wants the audience to get in and out as quickly as possible. It’s the most unfinished film to receive theatrical release since Pootie Tang.

Jonah Hex joins Ghost Rider and, more accurately, Catwoman on the short list of worst comic book movies ever, but I’m not sure it had to be that way. There may be a better, more developed movie somewhere in Jonah Hex, but its been slashed and burned away by a studio with no confidence in what it had. Maybe someday we’ll get to see a longer cut of the film — one that makes better sense and doesn’t reduce every performance to just a cameo. I don’t know that it will be a better movie, but at least it would be a movie.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Calendar/Film?Film=oid%3A1040833

Jonah Hex
Year Released: 2010
Directed By: Jimmy Hayward
Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn, Michael Shannon, Tom Wopat
(PG-13, 80 min.)

Jonah Hex: He's not dead, but he's all messed up. Screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (of the hyper-addled Crank franchise) provide this DC Comics' middle-tier Weird Western Tale with the X-treme/wicked/gnarly/"Dude, smash-cuts for everyone!" treatment. Directed by former Pixar animator-turned-replacement-director Hayward, the resulting film makes Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead look like a stone-cold neo-Western thoroughbred. It's not that this punch-drunk exercise in extraneous exposition and Adderall editing is utterly devoid of narrative sense (okay, yeah, it is, kinda) but that the inherent coolness of DC's straight-shootin', spook-talkin', bounty-huntin' killer with a conscience is totally lost in all the vapid, post-MTV clutter. While watching Jonah Hex, you'll yearn for the comparative calm of, say, The Wild Bunch or anything Antonio Margheriti ever did (and that includes Yor, the Hunter From the Future). Nonetheless, Brolin turns in a solid performance as Hex, a former Confederate soldier haunted by the death of his wife and son at the hands of his former ranking officer, Quentin Turnbull (a ham-on-wry Malkovich). Angst-ridden and vengeance-prone, Hex's dead man's hand holds an ace in the hole thanks to his scarred backstory, which includes both death and resurrection (by Native Americans, natch), leaving him with the ability to communicate with the dead. Romance was never high on DC's list of priorities, and accordingly Fox's whore with a heart of gold and (of all things) Vampira's waistline comes equipped with more action-oater add-ons (secreted ordnance, et al.) than actual charms. Where Jonah Hex does succeed is in the intensely detailed production design that especially re-creates the look and feel of a post-Civil War America gone freakish, which is backed by some sporadically splendid cinematography, courtesy of Mitchell Amundsen (Transformers). In the end, though, Jonah Hex is a sprawling, incoherent mess of a movie, all style (bad), no substance (worse), and capturing little if any of DC's Seventies-era mucho mojo.

Marc Savlov [2010-06-25]

http://movies.just-superb-products.com/the-curse-of-jonah-hex/

The curse of Jonah Hex?

June 24th, 2010 | Posted by

by Andy Gibbons

Given the way Toy Story 3 dominated the US box office chart over the weekend (I would describe an opening weekend of just over $110 million as pretty dominating), it’s perhaps understandable that the abject failure of another big budget summer hope has gone largely overlooked. Until now.

At the same time that people were flocking to catch up with Woody and the gang, very few could be bothered with the big screen debut of comic book outlaw Jonah Hex. The all-action western, which features a decent cast including Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich and Michael Fassbender, bagged a paltry $5.4 million during its first three days in cinemas across the pond and only just managed to crack the Top 10, opening in seventh spot behind the likes of Get Him To The Greek, Prince Of Persia and Shrek Forever After (which has been out in the US for over a month!).

Before Jonah Hex was released, it had a bit of a buzz about it – the comic book on which its based is suitably cultish and the on-set pictures of Megan looking foxy as tart with a heart Lilah certainly got pulses racing. Even the trailer showed promise. So who’s to blame? Well there were rumours of a troubled production and a period of reshoots earlier this year seem to lend some weight to that. It’s also fair to say that the critics weren’t kind; the film currently has a 14% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes with various reviews calling the movie inane, sloppily edited, painfully awkward and unintentionally funny, the most chopped up, stitched together Frankenstein job in recent memory and bracingly inept. As we all know though, critics only have limited influence so I can only guess that, when faced with the behemoth that is Toy Story 3, no one else can even come close (even though The Karate Kid added $30 million to it’s account over the same weekend).

At the moment Jonah Hex is due to open here on September 3rd with it’s only real competition that week coming from new Steve Carell / Paul Rudd comedy Dinner For Schmucks – whether or not Warner Bros. get behind it or let Jonah ride quietly off into the sunset though remains to be seen.

http://cynicritics.com/2010/06/24/review-jonah-hex/

REVIEW: Jonah Hex

Directed by: Jim Hayward
Written by: Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor (screenplay)
Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, and Michael Fassbender

We must face it: the comic book adaptation is here to stay. You can bet your (kick-) ass that any character that’s ever been drawn to a page to tell a story along with words will eventually get its Hollywood due. So step right up for Jonah Hex, yet another unknown adaptation from an allegedly brilliant source material.

Hex begins compellingly different than most of its counterparts. We begin almost immediately at our title character’s (Josh Brolin) moment of dire straits. Rather than have that Utopian, dull first few scenes with bright colors, giggling children, and adoring spouse, we see arch nemesis (Jon Malkovich) light them all on fire. One thing that can be said of Jonah Hex, if not much else, is that it doesn’t bull-s$#! you with its pretentious morality. The script may try to hint at a soul within our weary anti-hero, but Brolin quells it rather quickly.

That being said, there’s not much of a story here. Thankfully, director Jim Hayward seems to know this, and keeps “his” film at about 90 minutes. It’s pretty much an action go-getter right from the beginning. Following the family murder sequence at the beginning, we are treated to a very beautifully shot sequence in which Hex attempts to cash in a bounty on four wanted criminals. The crisp blue sky blending with the desert and later the violence evokes nothing less than last year’s Public Enemies, which is never a bad thing.

Sadly, though the visual wonders may occasionally show back up, the movie is dumped into a pile of revenge cliches and poorly drawn out characters. You won’t care about any of them. What sympathy that is garnered from Hex by Brolin in the beginning will be spent by the time he’s given his 50th menacing stare or Eastwood-esque growl. Brolin can use his quietness to great effect (No Country for Old Men), but here you’ll be left wanting something more.

This is also the case with the rest of the cast. John Malkovich attempts, and fails, at capturing the spirit of a beleaguered ex-Confederate-general-turned-terrorist. From the southern drawl to the ridiculous Weapons of Mass Destruction plot-line, his character is the definition of campy. Malkovich, being the fine actor he is, manages to squeeze a little bit out of it, but not much.

As the token female, Megan Fox couldn’t be more disastrously miscast. Feminist prostitutes were done well in Sin City, but she is just dreadful. Thankfully, her one-note performance and character are only around for about 15 minutes total.

The best performance, if you could call it that, in the film has to go to rising star Michael Fassbender. As an overly-Irish right hand man, he takes a caricature and kind of makes it a character. This guy has an Oscar coming his way one of these days, mark my words.

Since this is the summer of 2010, of course the protagonist of this movie will be anti-government, and the government officials will be played by comedians (Will Arnett) and be appropriately foolish and incompetent because they are not menacing or evil. Though it offers a view of anti-government extremism, the supposed middle ground played by Brolin’s character dismisses any sort of government job with a disapproving glare. The very reason this comic was chosen for adaptation by a big studio was because someone probably sensed the trend, and wanted to continue cashing in.

Hayward has potential as a director. It’s very possible this is the bone Hollywood has thrown him; his Jaws to see if he can handle it. Unfortunately, by the time Arnett shows up, you begin to realize that this is a movie about actors cashing in; the men on the sound of their bankable voices, and the woman on her beauty and sass. As far as Westerns go it’s horrid, but as far as comic book adaptations go, it’s par for the course.

Grade: C-

http://www.tsweekly.com/screen/film/hexed-damned-from-the-start-jonah-hex-never-lives-up-to-its-potential.html

Hexed: Damned from the start, Jonah Hex never lives up to its potential
Wednesday, 23 June 2010 12:38 Morgan P. Salvo

It all made sense during Jonah Hex’s ending credits that this PG-13 tease had Neveldine & Taylor (responsible for Crank) written all over it. But then it made even more sense to find out they dropped out and whoever took over left the good ideas on the cutting room floor. Based on the DC comic of the same name, Jonah Hex is the newest comic-book-character-turned-anti-hero movie.

Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is an old west scar-faced drifter, bounty hunter and stoic gunslinger who can track down anyone...and anything. Jonah’s violent history is steeped in perplexing myth and legend and has left him with one foot in the natural world and one on the “other” side. Hex is hired to stop terrorist Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), the same man who murdered his wife and family, so of course revenge becomes the driving motive.

After a quick origin in unnecessary cutout animation with scattershot narration, the dusty plot never materializes past the vengeance theme. Hex was underdone in parts and way overdone in others. Fire seemed to be a theme, but after the bullet-hailing Gatling gun in the first major scene, it felt like they blew their fiery wad. Barely 81 minutes long (including credits), the end product plays like a highlights reel, connecting the dots to previously filmed explosive action sequences. For a finale, Turnbull’s warmonger army attacks the nation’s capitol on the Fourth of July. The weapons of mass destruction are cannonballs that look like oversized bowling balls and are detonated by glowing golden orbs.

While the film is flawed in more ways than one, Brolin himself just keeps getting better. No one could’ve pulled off this role as well. He’s tough and ornery while literally doing it tongue-in-cheek (through his branded, scarred face we see his teeth and tongue). Megan Fox is shot with “Porn-meets-Cosmo” soft lens in every close up. Fox is a sexpot in a charisma vacuum—surprisingly empty and lifeless. Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) has the most fun as the knife-wielding tattooed psychopath. Malkovich exudes all his villainy in a Southern dialect, like an evil version of Grizzly Adams meets Tennessee Williams. The list of cameos is more proof of cutting room floor trash. Michael Shannon (Bug) is a fighting-ring impresario with “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” screen time, while Tom Wopat (yes that Dukes of Hazzard Wopat) chews up a few seconds, along with Will Arnett (Arrested Development), Wes Bentley (American Beauty) and Aidan Quinn.

Apparently when Neveldine and Taylor abandoned the project, director Jimmy Hayward, an animation vet (Horton Hears a Who!), took over in a slipshod way—conducting last-minute reshoots and failing to capture the tone of a ghoulish gunslinger that would have come naturally to Sam Raimi or Robert Rodriguez. Hex is violent and brutal, yet lacks blood and gore. All killing scenes were done off camera. I thought if you stuck a guy’s head in a whirling propeller that we would see more than a shot of his feet twitching. Thankfully, composer Marco Beltrami and the band, Mastodon, come through with some decent sonic blasts and a frenetic spaghetti western metal score.

The tagline of the Hex is “Revenge Gets Ugly”—except it just gets mediocre. But even with all its glaring faults, Hex had the feel of a decent TV show. And if it had been a cliffhanger, I would probably watch it again next week.

Jonah Hex
★★✩✩✩
Starring Josh Brolin, Megan Fox,
John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender
Directed by Jimmy Hayward
Rated PG-13