Jonah Hex
Oh dear oh dear. Remember Ghost Rider? Rubbish wasn’t it? A badly CGI’d Nic Cage rolling about and taking down crappy MTV villains while comedy Hammer Horror mist floated about and Sam Neill did lots of expositional mumbling. Bloody awful. In it’s favour though, it was undeniably fun. Cage and the crew obviously realising the sheer stupidity of the material and the script and just rolling with it, adding a charm that made it far more enjoyable than it had any right to be. Suffice to say, Jonah Hex leaves its sense of humour at the door….
Fig 1: YES!
Now, Jonah Hex has a particularly weird history, even taking into consideration the fact that he inhabits a universe who’s biggest export is a grown man in a giant blue baby grow. Hex started life as a run-of-the-mill cowboy, then turned up in a godawful tech-noir postapocalyptic setting, then went all black magicky and weird, and now comes full circle. Now, before we get on to the film proper, lemme axe yous a question: If you had an ultraviolent western on the drawing board, who would you turn to? Maybe Scorcese could do something with it? How about Clint? No..no..wait..it’s coming to me..YES! It has to be Jimmy Hayward. Whaddaya mean who? He directed ‘Horton Hears A Who!’ stoopid! He’s be perfect!
God alone knows what goes on in Hollywood boardrooms, but whatever it is, it hasn’t got much to do with making quality movies. So, Our Jonah is a badass scarfaced bugger with the power of life and death over evil-doers, a Megan Fox shaped love interest and a presidential price on his head. Now I’m no expert, but seriously, you’d have to work pretty damn hard to make those ingredients taste bad wouldn’t you? But try as he might, Hayward and associates have somehow produced a cake made out of shit, that no amount of American Gothic icing is going to save.
To be fair, things do start fairly promisingly, we get short busrts of a super-mean Josh Brolin facing off against a Civil War terrorist (naturally, it has to be a terrorist…)in what looks like it might be a really good supernatural western. It isn’t. Instead an admmitedly game Brolin spits out ridiculous dialogue as he grieves for his wife and child, and there’s actually a pretty interesting back story there -Jonah kills big bad Confederate General’s son, big bad Confederate general kills Jonah’s family and tries to offf Hex too, only to have him come back with spooky supernatural powers and become ever-more consumed with revenge, espousing all human contact. Except Megan Fox in her sweaty underwear obviously. Well – you would, wouldn’t you?
Fig 2: NO!
Anyway, for some sort of reason, president Ulysses S Grant has decided that Hex and his sweaty other half are the best people to take down the aforementioned terrorist, Hex hoping to redeem his sense of honour through revenge in the process. Unfortunately the film seems to forget about most of this about 30 minutes in, instead concentrating on rolling from one overloaded action sequence to the next. All this would probably still be forgiveable if we got an interesting leading man or some semblance of commitment.
Instead Hex is wiped of his comic-book anti-hero roots and becomes another faceless mouthpiece for a bunch of badly thought out one-liners. It’s Judge Dredd all over again. The producers are also obviously hell-bent on preserving their all-important PG-13 rating as well, cutting away from on screen killing, meaning the action sequences amount to a lot of barrels exploding and men leaping through the air. Seriously, The A-Team was more violent (and I don’t mean the recent remake). If there’s one thing that could have saved Hex, it would have been willingness on Hayward’s part to just really go for it. I don’t know about you, but if I’m offered a supernatural western with a demented, scarred and cursed hero, I want to really see that blood. I want arms being blown off, severed heads, horses being chopped in half. What I get is some sub-Wild Wild West theatrics and a meandering storyline with plot holes you could stampede a herd of broncos through. Even John Malkovitch -normally eminently reliable in the cackling villain stakes, seems bored and confused.
Jonah Hex is a short film that feels over-long, with some terrible performances that can’t be saved by Brolin’s well-meant attempts. The editing and photography is overly slick, the violence watered down and pointless. In all, it’s a massively wasted opportunity and another example of cut n’ pate filmmaking that needs to be outlawed.
