Dir. by Jimmy Hayward - 1 hr. 22 min.
Official Trailer
I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie where literally every choice made is the wrong one before. I almost don't know where to begin, and before I do, I'll both admit that I've read the Jonah Hex comic book and that I don't care about changes made from the source material.
What we've got here is a Civil War-era movie, and Jonah Hex is a disgraced, disfigured former Confederate soldier. The plot involves a nemesis who fakes his death for all of about 5 minutes of screen time (John Malkovich's Quentin Turnbull, about a million explosions, and a super weapon that resembles a nuclear orange. I'm not joking about the explosions, this is literally pornography for pyromaniacs. There's a heavy-metal soundtrack, which works only in the sense that I would associate heavy music with lots of explosions. There are an abundance of extended scenes in the middle of the night, and they are frequently too dark to tell what's going on. And in such dark sequences, and when you've got a character that essentially has a vagina on the side of his face, there are opportunities to reveal that disfigurement to effect. Instead, it was treated visually as being no more important than Hex's left shoe. In a year when the comic-book movie backlash finally crested, there's an extended "motion comic" sequence in the first five minutes of the film. There's an inexplicable pseudo-MMA scene, for no good reason other than MMA is popular now (I even groaned during "Sherlock Holmes'" extensive MMA nonsense - it's apropos of nothing, particularly in period films). By the end of the film, Jonah seems to have acquired Dr. Doolittle powers, assembling the beginning of an all-animal posse.
Maybe the only good thing I can say about this film is that I've discovered the easiest acting role ever - playing a hooker in a PG-13 film. Megan Fox really lucked out here, the closest thing to a sexy scene she had to play was a few seconds of her tightly-bound bosom, heaving in fear. Other than that, she seemed to fight with men more than plying her trade.
Even though the run time is listed at 1 hr. 22 min., the credits rolled at the 73 minute mark. Now, I don't want anyone to think that I'm asking for more Jonah Hex, but it's clear that something is missing. I don't really care what the excuse is - a bad movie is a bad movie.
1 / 5 - DVD
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