JONAH HEX is a train wreck. It is a badly edited and directed hack job that is barely coherent.
It is like a movie put together by people who had too much to drink. Whatever
story was there has been edited down to a skeleton- a confused mess with action and not enough to develop the story plot lines. The plot is jumbled confusion of ideas and the final product is very loosely based
on the original source material. After reading up on the original comic
book storylines, JONAH HEX would have been a more interesting film if it followed closer to the comic book and allowed itself
to breathe.
The
movie amounts to an ex-Confederate officer turned bounty hunter who seeks to go after the bad guys after his former commander
(Quentin Turnbull) burns his family alive and scars his face. Turnball appears
to die in a fire and Hex occasionally visits Liliah, a hooker that is in love with him.
Then Hex discovers Turnbull is alive and he begins his quest for revenge anew as he is out to stop Turnbull from destroying
Washington
D.C. with a new super weapon.
This movie went wrong in so many places. The origin of Hex isn’t as interesting as the comic book origin. Then Megan Fox sleepwalks through her role and she wouldn’t be missed if her character wasn’t
in the film at all. John Malkovich seems to be having fun as he chews the
scenery. Brolin isn’t bad as Hex, but I wonder what Thomas Jane would
have done with the character (Thomas Jane campaigned for the role down to having himself made up as Hex). The 81 minute running time is just a cramped together movie that you wonder who edited this film
down and you can see why the original directors, Neveldine and Taylor, walked off the project (they helped write the script
and you wonder how much their script show through). The origin story is
partly played out in a quickly animated sequence where shooting it live would have worked so much better. I know some directors and producers love to take comic book source material in weird directions. RENEGADE (aka BLUEBERRY) is a more coherent Western comic book adaptation than
JONAH HEX (despite the peyote trip third act in RENEGADE). I wished that
JONAH HEX was a better film instead of feeling I wanted my last 80 minutes back.
Watch the trailer and skip the film.
This movie review is ©6-21-2010 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission. Send all comments to lord_pragmagtic@hotmail.com
