Woogmoog

Review: Jonah Hex

Just about the only thing Jonah Hex has going for it is its running time: discounting the credits sequence, the movie’s really only about 75 minutes long. Please don’t take this as a recommendation. Standing outside in the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays for the same amount of time is much more entertaining, and you save a few bucks to boot. Nothing in Jonah Hex works, from the characters to the action to the writing and the special effects: it’s all a boring, stilted mess.

Even the film’s short running time isn’t that much of a blessing – you’ve paid full price for a movie that’s barely an hour long. And, unlike some other bad movies, there’s no decent movie hiding anywhere underneath the editing or the PG-13 rating. Nothing could fix this movie or improve upon it other than the creation of a time machine that prevents it from being made (or at least prevents you from seeing it).

The movie opens with the eponymous bounty hunter gunning down a town of bad guys with a pair of gatling guns strapped to his horse. Does that sound incredibly idiotic to you? Good. I can even see horse-mounted gatling guns being sorta cool, as a hilarious, over-the-top climax to a satisfying series of action sequences, but nothing in this movie comes close to being satisfying or entertaining.

Jonah Hex also gets wrong just about every single Western movie trope, much how the Twilight or Underworld movies miss out on just about every single little detail that makes a vampire movie decent. Instead of beautiful, wide open locales and scenic vistas, we get horribly cramped CG settings. Instead of exciting gun battles and interesting characters, we have Josh Brolin mumbling from one point of contact to the next. I lost count of the number of times Hex walked away from exploding buildings. Hell, according to the movie, everything in the West explodes the way we like to pretend Michael Bay explodes – wooden saloons, arena tents, trains, haystacks, Will Arnett – everything. The action is flat, blurry, and uninteresting. Every time someone is shot, they are flung backwards by a cable some forty feet. Just when you think the movie couldn’t possibly take another dumber left turn, John Malkovich builds a supergun powered by what look to be the seven magic Dragon Balls.

Also, I hope you like Mastodon, because every shot is accompanied by absolutely retarded thrashing metal riffs. Remember when that sort of thing was used to effect sparingly in something like 300? Same thing here, except replace “sparingly” with “fuck you.” It’s horrid.

Say what you will about Wild Wild West, at least that movie had a giant mechanical spider. Jonah Hex had a ridiculous 6 barreled cannon mounted on an ironclad battleship a la Super Mario 3.

The movie is filled with folks who are woefully miscast and misused such as Will Arnett as some sort of U.S. Army lackey. Was there another version of the script where Arnett was Hex’s sidekick? Arnett, like just about every other potentially interesting cast member, has maybe two lines in the whole movie. How the hell do you misuse folks like Lance Reddick, Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Dean Morgan (no idea he was even in this) and Michael Shannon (I swear I don’t even remember seeing him). Hell, even Megan Fox, who’s top billed (or at least, her breasts are) is in the movie like twice.

Anyway, President Grant orders Will Arnett to go and find Jonah Hex, ex-Confederate and bounty hunter, because he’s apparently the only person that can crack this case and save the free world. But it never seems like Jonah Hex is actually needed to do anything, The army seems to find John Malkovich’s Koopa Cannon just fine by the end without any kind of input from our hero.

The less said about Jonah Hex’s magical powers, the better. It includes way too much backstory and there are way too many weird rules spit out by Brolin’s grumbling expository narrative in one short scene for us to make any sense of it. Here’s how you fix that, filmmakers: Jonah Hex can talk to Bruce Willis. That’s it. Don’t clutter it with some weird slow-motion fistfight taking place on Mars or in Hex’s mind or whatever that was supposed to be.

Director Jimmy Hayward’s only other directing credit is the animated Horton Hears a Who!, and Jonah Hex makes clear that he should turn right around and head back to being an animator. Apparently director Francis Lawrence was brought in for some heavy reshoots. Maybe the movie could have been good, if you did the following: find the people who did production design on Hellboy (it’s very hard to make the Wild West look dull), have Lawrence direct the whole thing, make it basically like Constantine and Punisher: War Zone by way of Sergio Leone, and voila, halfway decent movie. Basically, to improve this movie, you need to change just about every single aspect of it. That is not a good thing.

Again, the short length is probably the movie’s only blessing. Had I been crossing the 90 minute mark, I would have been begging for sweet, sweet release with every dynamite-launching pistol fired.

I don’t know much about Jonah Hex even within his own comics, but if you can’t do better than a 22-minute episode of Batman: The Animated Series which featured Hex in a flashback with Ra’s Al Ghul, steam airships, Malcolm McDowell and fucking ninjas, what are you even trying to accomplish? Why does your movie exist?

BOTTOM LINE: Dumb, annoying, nonsensical, ugly. Extra point awarded for a scene where Josh Brolin vomits out a crow, and an extra half point for Lance Reddick’s character’s incredibly inane line, “Happy Fourth of July, son.” Do not waste your time. Not even bad in that “so bad it’s great” vibe. Just awful.

1.8/10