Jonah Hex Review

Jonah Hex is a hurried and disconnected half-of-a-film that clocks in with a running time of around 80 minutes.  In an attempt to cobble together a review that matches this travesty’s misguided efforts to create something as short and shallow as possible, I will be brief and blunt.

Jonah Hex’s (Josh Brolin) wife and child were murdered by a bad man named Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich).  To add further pain, Turnbull brands Jonah’s face and leaves him for dead.  Jonah survives and now, inexplicably, has the ability to wake the dead.  Don’t worry about why he has this power, he just does.

The resurrected Jonah Hex is now a bounty hunter called upon by the United States government to stop Turnbull.  Hex thought Turnbull was dead, but he isn’t.  Don’t worry about why Hex thought he was dead or why he isn’t dead, he’s just not.  Instead, Turnbull is assembling a giant weapon to blow up the entire country.  I don’t know why he wants to blow up the country.  Maybe it’s because he’s the villain, and villains do terrible things in terrible movies like this.

Oh, and Megan Fox is a prostitute.

There is something extremely wrong with Jonah Hex. The director, Jimmy Hayward, starts the film off with a bizarre cartoon montage that skims over the entire setup and essentially starts the movie square in the second act.  Perhaps this was an attempt to jump directly into the conflict and gun slinging, but it creates an empty feeling from the very beginning.

It becomes impossible to invest in any of the characters because we really don’t know where they came from or why they are doing anything.  Relationships are vague and brushed over quickly.  Major characters come and go so quickly that the plot becomes heavily convoluted.  Michael Shannon, a fairly prolific actor who was electric in the recent film The Runaways, is reduced to a role as a barker so small it could be confused for a cameo, but it’s a featured role underdeveloped to the point that he’s barely on screen.

Four editors credited on this bumbled project is a sure sign that these shambles are the result of a “fix.”  If anything, I feel sorry for Brolin, who is a likable actor that deserves better projects than this.  The thought of him waking everyday and gluing that horrible makeup to his face only to produce this end result is heartbreaking.

Jonah Hex might have been acceptable had it been directed by an independent auteur and presented as a meditation on what is wrong with big, dumb movies.  But it isn’t.  It’s merely an attempt at a big, dumb movie that is so slight that it could hardly be considered big.  That simply leaves you with this: dumb movie.

.5 out of 5