A Review of Jonah Hex

When approaching a film like Jonah Hex, it’s simply best not to. But if you have to, don’t make eye contact and know what’s going to happen before it does. It’s based on a comic book. Don’t expect realism. It’s set in the Wild West. Don’t expect historical accuracy. It’s a summer action movie. Don’t expect to think much beyond, “Holy shit, didja see that blow up!?” And even with all these restraints placed on your gag reflex, Jonah Hex still manages to make you queasy.

It opens up with a true-to-its roots comic book inspired sequence. You’re shown some live action stuff that quickly becomes highly stylized as it pans through sweeping valleys and Confederate and Union camps, all trying to play out some mild back story where you’re not sure who’s who, what they’re doing, or why they didn’t just spend the extra time to make this part of the movie. But that would have made this film longer and at only an hour and twenty minutes long, it’s plenty overdrawn anyway. Eventually it opens on our lovable, squeezable, huggable anti-hero dragging along some bodies from his latest bounty hunt and it quickly goes south from there. From the moment he tosses a bag with a head in it to the sheriff to the moment when the sheriff says he’s going to collect the bounty on Hex’s head, the acting is an insult to freshman drama students everywhere. This is also where it starts a slippery slope downhill. And that’s a relative term as the movie was 6 feet under when we started.

After unsheathing twin gatling guns mounted on his horse and mowing down all who oppose him while dodging rifle bullets, Mr. Hex just strolls right on out of town and on to his next merry adventure. And then we meet the lovely Megan Fox. I used the word “lovely” as ironic! She’s not a good actress. Her best “lines” are her figure (go go gadget-pun!) and as far as that goes, she still manages the impossible and falls flat. He whole role in this movie (in which she gets roughly six or seven minutes of screen time despite being featured prominently in the trailers) is to go, “Look at my tits and here are my legs!” and she manages to mess even this simple role up. In a sex scene (that thankfully fades to black very quick) with the titular character, it feels as though she stated in her contract, “I want to be a mature actor and have myself a sex scene now!” The whole two minutes building up to it feels so forced and unnatural. She plays a frontier prostitute, so she’s hardened and can handle herself, as illustrated when an obsessed customer tries to take her for his own and despite him getting hold of her derringer she still kills him easy as 1-2-3. But her kryptonite seems to be Irishmen from whom a swift slap can render her helpless like all the other female leads ever. Realistic, sure. Entertaining or fitting to character, no.

But that seems to be a lot of what this movie does. Its characters are so bipolar as to whether or not they’re this, or that, or that or this. One moment Jonah can dodge a bullet he can’t even see coming, the next he can’t dodge one fired at him from a good range while he’s looking the shooter in the eye. The only character with a modicum of sameness is the evil villain played by John Malkovich (just another in a long line of actors proving that they too have bills) who is consistently outgunning Jonah, even in Jonah’s dream sequences. His whole fiendish plot doesn’t really add up or make a whole lot of sense but I’m willing to let that go because the movie is a comic book action flick that takes itself super duper seriously. Thank God he was in the movie however, because the other actors couldn’t have saved a lion from a gazelle, let alone this movie.

Jonah Hex is played by Josh Brolin, who has done some other movies that have had actual acting in them (No Country for Old Men being one of the few) but clearly he brought his Grindhouse game here. I’m sure in part it’s the writing’s fault, but the character isn’t likable as even an antihero. Half of his lines are literally someone saying something to him (sometimes not even that) and him grunting in return. The aforementioned Megan Fox can’t even do her aforementioned role, and the rest of the cast is even worse. The bit parts are extremely poorly played and the conversations between them and the main characters are often spliced with incredibly distracting shots. Especially the one where there’s an arbitrary ring fight. The best actor is Will Arnett, who actually does what he normally does. He plays a US Lieutenant who’s been put in charge of putting Jonah in charge. The problem lies in the fact that even though he’s dead serious, Arnett is so tied to comedy that I couldn’t do anything but laugh every time he was on screen, no matter what. And the rest of the movie was adept as inspiring equally unintentional laughs.

At one point Jonah is wielding two “dynamite crossbow guns” which are actually kind of neat. But he went to the trouble of seeing his bit-part weapon smith to get them, and what does he do? He uses them once, and drops them. In another highlight he shoots a crate of dynamite and, instead of blowing it up as it would in any other action movie, he manages to somehow light one of the Everlast™ fuses. And so one of the main henchmen (Irishman) grabs the bundle and tosses it at Jonah while he’s running away mortally wounded. This leads to Jonah’s resurrection ritual and at the start of the movie a crow flew across the screen and I thought, “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if they rereleased The Crow into theaters?” Wish granted. Thanks Monkey’s Paw.

The absurdity just escalates when they bring in Jonah’s ability to talk to the dead by touching them and bringing them back for as long as he does. This leads to a “comedic” moment where he tries to talk to someone he killed a long time back and as he wakes the dead gentleman up, he gets punched, severing the link between them and returning the dead man back to death. Multiple times. There’s another moment where he’s talking to a dead man to interrogate him and despite the deceased being in agonizing burning pain, all he can do is very calmly demand Jonah stop the pain. In the movie’s absolute most ridiculous point they show you the view from the telescope gun sight on the villain’s super weapon. And the reticule on this gun sight is IN THE SHAPE OF THE CAPITOL BUILDING. At that point I couldn’t contain my laughter any longer and burst into hysterics, making another wish along the lines of my own demise. Unfortunately this is the movie they’d loop on the in-flight to Hell.

I was lucky enough to catch Jonah Hex for free last night. Jonah Hex, for free, is a bad movie. God help you if you spent eight dollars to see this. It’s full of actors that calling “bad” would be a compliment, it’s utterly ridiculous and absurd, and it will have you leaving the theater wanting to punch someone else so that you’re no longer alone in your suffering. The one redeeming quality to the movie is that it’s very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely they’ll make another one. And on one last note, I’ll bring to your attention an editing mistake I noticed that bugged the hell out of me the entire film. In the editing room, when they had finished stitching this rotting thing together, they forgot to hit the ‘delete’ button. And with that, Jonah Hex was released to theaters this week. God help us all.