Film Review | Jonah Hex

Here’s the thing: I really wanted to enjoy Jonah Hex, perhaps more than I’ve wanted to enjoy a film in a while.

Based on a DC Comics weird western and featuring the eponymous Hex: a surly, scarred Revolutionary War veteran turned bounty hunter, the adventures seemed to be a delicious blend of western mood mixed in with some good old fashioned comic book hijinks. Even though I’m into comics, I had never got around to picking up Hex, and was hoping that the film would serve as a nice little introduction.

This hope was cut short as soon as the reviews started rolling in, however. There were so many negative reviews that you simply couldn’t put it all down to a matter of opinion or taste: it was official – Jonah Hex is a mess.

The adaptation – directed by Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward, otherwise new to full length features – suffered through a myriad of re-writes and directorial re-shuffling… and the finished product (using the word very loosely) is tragic precisely because it shows it. Clocking in at a criminally brief 80 minutes, it becomes abundantly clear that as the release date loomed near, nobody could be bothered anymore.

Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is a bounty hunter in the wild west who can track down anyone, or anything. Scarred by his experiences in the war and the horrendous murder of his family, he gains the ability to speak with the dead: a miserable upside to a bleak existence, apart from the thwarted affection he feels with Lilah (Megan Fox), whose life in a brothel has left her with scars of her own.
The scarred drifter will have to confront his past, however, once the US military makes him an offer he can’t refuse: they will clear the price on his head if he tracks down and stops the sinister terrorist Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), the man who killed Hex’s family and mutilated his face with a branding iron. 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.

 In the comics, Hex has no supernatural powers. The fact that they had to tack black magic onto the film is not only irritating to fans, it’s also indicative of the way it’s put together as a whole. Instead of finding real solutions to problems, the team behind the blockbuster-that-nearly-was just attack it with more and more decoration in the hope that it will stick. Suffice to say that it doesn’t, and hopefully, the fact that the film was a resounding critical and box office flop will serve as a lesson to Hollywood in the future (not that it has ever really heeded such omens). It basically boils down to this: mixing genres may seem like an easy way to make money, on paper: it’ll attract a variety of audiences in one fell swoop, right? But it should only ever be undertaken by auteurs… or at least enthusiastic professionals. I can easily see somebody like Tarantino or Rodriguez turning Hex into a winner but in lesser hands, the material withers into tired cliché, each element vying for space on a canvas that wasn’t strong enough to accommodate one genre, let alone two or three.

What’s even sadder is that this becomes clear in the opening couple of minutes. The origin story rolls along, Brolin’s stereotypically cod-Eastwood monologue in tow, before cutting to a sorry mashup of CGI and traditional animation to explain away the supernatural elements, once again showing all and sundry that this is a project lacking in both funds and vision. Not to be mean and invoke a lauded auteur for comparison, but just think of the animated bit in the first Kill Bill: it was there to wow on its own merits, not to plug a hole for the sake of an already dubious move in the script.

Brolin makes a good effort, but he can’t stop the deluge of rubbish from crushing him. He certainly gets no help: Malkovich looks bored, operating on autopilot as annoying arch-villain, Fox is about exciting as she is in the Transformers films (read: very, but for reasons unrelated to acting ability), and Michael Fassbender, as Turnbull’s right-hand-man, is criminally underused. While one could find excuses for his co-stars, what exactly is Fassbender doing in this mess? Having straddled both the mainstream and cult in an impressively short time, juggling artsy fare like Hunger with the more viscerally entertaining Centurion and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in between, he has all the makings of a budding superstar that definitely shouldn’t have any time to waste for ‘quick paycheck’ work.

So perhaps it is fortunate that he is barely visible in this paltry 80 minute anti-epic.