Jonah Hex (Jimmy Hayward, 2010)

Bad movies come out all the time. Some movies look good, but turn out bad – that’s a shame. No one likes being duped into sitting through a dud. Much more rarely, there are movies that look bad and turn out to be Ok, even good sometimes. That’s a nice treat. Most of the time, though, you can see a bad one coming and avoid it altogether.

But most frustrating of all is a movie that should, by all means, be good, but ends up terrible. Such is the case of Jonah Hex, a god-awful abortion of a movie if ever there was one.

When Jonah Hex was first announced, it ended up on my list of Most Anticipated Films of the Year. A Southern Gothic/Horror-Western hybrid about an obscure DC Comics character with supernatural powers kicking ass all over the post-Civil War South? Written and directed by the crazy fucks behind the Crank movies? Starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michaels Shannon & Fassbender, Will Arnett, and with a little guaranteed Megan Fox eye candy thrown in for good measure? With music from Mastodon? I was immediately on board. Seriously, how could this not rule?

Good Lord. Let me count the ways.

Neveldine & Taylor were smart to split. One of the best decisions they’ve probably ever made. I’d love to get my hands on their original script for the film (I remember reading a zombie army was involved - nice) to see what could have been. The film as it exists borrows liberally from several genre traditions. Actions and westerns, and to a much lesser extent, horror films, are referenced in style and more. Unfortunately, Jonah Hex appears to borrow exclusively from the shitty ones. The movie’s such a colossal clusterfuck that any interesting ideas (but believe me, there are few) are quickly pushed aside as we jump from one stupid scene to another.

This is the anti-A-Team, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Big dumb fun needs to actually be fun or it’s just, you know, big and dumb. Every cast member is wasted here. Brolin, hard as he tries, can’t carry a film this broken by himself. Malkovich is clearly phoning it in, his Southern accent fading in and out. Fassbender, one of the most interesting actors breaking out right now, had he been given more to work with may have conjured a villain of near-Joker badassery. He’s capable of it. However, the part is so threadbare that we’re left with a stupid Irish caricature who poses no real threat (brief digression: on the topic of ethnic characters, I take issue with the following: one, do we really need the ex-slave character saying “Jonah, you was never for secession or slavery. Why you keep fightin’ for the Confederacy?” or whatever. This information adds nothing to the character, except maybe we’re supposed to think he’s a good guy because he was against slavery? Maybe? Horseshit. And two, any goodwill you’re trying to get by giving Hex a Native American wife [who does nothing but looks pretty and gets murdered] is pretty much negated when the only other Indians you show are performing spooky ceremonies and smoking a peace pipe. I’m by no means a strictly PC kinda critic, but yikes, guys.) Will Arnett is laughably miscast. And perhaps worst of all, despite prominent billing and character name, for Christsakes, Michael Shannon has two lines, one of which is off-screen. At a merciful eighty minutes, whatever development his character had surely couldn’t have been the source of all the film’s problems. Someone get those deleted scenes online, ASAP.

Maybe worst of all, Jonah Hex commits the cardinal sin of this type of film: it’s dull. Painfully dull. It adds nothing to the Western or action genres. The action sequences pack no punch. A well-shot train hijacking is the best thing the film has going for it in terms of interesting set pieces, but it’s brief and quickly forgotten. And I mean c’mon: if the sight of Megan Fox in old-timey prostitute garb ain’t enough to get my blood pumping, you’ve fucked up. Big time.

And that’s a nice image to sum up the film, I think: Megan Fox in a corset. Ostensibly, this should be awesome. This should be the best thing in the world. But when it comes down to it, Hex, like Fox herself, is obnoxious, dull, and ultimately useless. Ok, maybe that’s a little hard on Megan. I actually don’t mind her that much (here, like in most films, she’s given so little to do that she’s almost a non-entity). But this movie sure sucks. I’ll be forever bummed by what it could have been.

Oh well. There’s always the eventual re-boot. [D-] 80min, 35mm