Jonah Hex | Action | rated PG-13 (A,L,V) | starring Josh Brolin, John Malcovich, Megan Fox | 1:20 mins
Civil war veteran Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is nearly killed in an act of vengeance by a commanding officer, Turnbull (John Malcovich). Alive, now able to communicate with the dead, but branded forever with a burned face, Hex spends his days as a merciless bounty hunter armed with an arsenal of advanced weaponry. When it appears that Turnbull is still alive and plotting a massive attack on the post-war reconstructionist American government, Hex is recruited by order of Ulysses S. Grant to stop it and get his revenge in the process.
Jonah Hex succeeds where Barry Sonnenfeld so spectacularly failed with Wild Wild West many years ago. It take a Western, twists it through the lens of a comic book action picture where everything in it is a little bit sillier and larger than life, then pumps it full of impossibly advanced weapons and technology that would have a basement/teenage internet critic with a basic grasp of history in a plot-hole induced convulsive fit on the steps of the theater.
It’s a wacky B-movie with a half-insane anti-hero, some well-staged shoot-out sequences, a large-scale history-twisting plot and a dark sense of humor that works to elicit “did I just see that” belly laughs. The script is goofy, the dialog stilted, the narration completely useless but whether sci-fi, mystical or just brutal there is more than enough craziness going on to keep it interesting all the way up to the end. The movie’s complete unwillingness to take itself seriously makes it all go down smooth.
Hex is put together with maximum efficiency. Short and sweet. It asks to give us nothing more than Hex shooting thugs, riding his horse (which he hasn’t bothered to name) and talking to the dead (a nicely executed little effect). It dispenses with an sense of pretention or character motivation other than “save the town”, “get revenge”. Jonah Hex as played with maximum gruffness by Brolin is not a guy you’d want to spend a lot of time with. Other than a beautiful hooker (Megan Fox, in the requisite useless female sidekick/one-thing-he-cares-about role), Hex hates everyone and they hate him. Brolin mumbles Hex’s one-liners out of his prostetic makeup with a solid dead pan delivery. He’s a Western tough guy. Anyone asking what happened to his face will not live to see another second. Malcovich is quite funny in a fright wig, full-blown camp mode and an attitude to throw whisky in the eye of anyone who gets cross with him.
The movie’s biggest flaw: like many revenge movies it falls on the crutch of showing and re-showing us the tragic events that inspired Hex to the point where it just becomes screaming noise. We know his wife and son were killed in the first few minutes, we don’t need to see it in flashback again and again. The movie lingers on pain, with Brolin screaming in agony over either his loss or the physical pain of dying and coming back to life over and over. These scenes are edited to hell to keep the audience punished.
Then the movie makes a dissapointingly bad miscalculation in the critical climax. Going completely overboard on action we get both a final battle between foes and a metaphorical final battle between them. Why the surreal cross-cutting? The final battle is far more than enough, I don’t need to see a fake one along side it. It’s a botched idea that pulls the movie way down just when it should have been hitting it home.
But it’s that wacky mix of the supernatural, sci-fi and the western that made it work for me. Hex touches a corpse and can talk to the dead, interrogating him until the hounds of hell show up. He has mini-guns on his horse, hand-held explosive cross bows and Malcovich’s villain obtains an impressive town-destroying explosive. The rules of this movie’s universe are set up and paid off well even if Hex’s personal backstory remains complete mumbo-jumbo the entire time.
For those willing to go with all this converging lunacy, Jonah Hex is a deliciously entertaining funhouse. A funny, creative and outrageous spin on the Western with a different kind of hero. It’s a mix that really shouldn’t work, but – despite a few misteps – does quite well for itself. After the failure of Wild Wild West it takes a gutsy studio to approve such a purely pulp piece of cinema camp, particularly as a big summer movie and based on a comic book that nobody I know has ever heard of. But the WWW comparison (as there really is no other movie like this) only makes Jonah Hex look all the better.