Jonah Hex Review

Jonah Hex is an absolute mystery to me. And not in a good way. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie that was so blatantly chopped to a bare minimum. Clearly there is much more to this movie that goes well beyond its 80 minute runtime.

The plot is actually relatively simple despite the lack of explanation. Former Confederate soldier Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), after his family is murdered by Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), seeks vengeance against their murderer. But when Turnbull supposedly dies in a hotel fire, he decides to become a bounty hunter by trade. Hex also has the ability to speak with the dead as the apparent result of some sort of Native American witchcraft. When Turnbull reemerges after stealing some sort of super weapon, the government believes that Hex is the only one who can track him down and offers him a bounty to do so. Hex is also involved with the prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox) who so desperately wants to settle down with him. Despite the fact that her job requires her to be a whore. Which might make the whole settling down thing a little difficult, but I digress.

The movie then moves on rails towards its inevitable conclusion, following the loose threads of the plot to string together something watchable. If you’re wondering what exactly this weapon is, you won’t get that answer. It makes things explode is probably about the extent of it and is fueled by an orange glowing ball. Or if you want to know just what is so special about Jonah Hex, the answer is essentially “the Indians did it.” But apparently you’re just not supposed to care and just keep your mind focused on the fact things explode. At no point does “Jonah Hex” even attempt to pause for character development, save for a few plot based conversations that ever so briefly venture into character developing territory.

What strikes me as odd is the way that there is such a fantastic cast in this movie and yet the majority of them are given little more than cameos. Michael Shannon, nominated for an Oscar for his awesome performance in Revolutionary Road, is given “and” billing in the credits but literally introduces a fight that is completely irrelevant to anything that happens in the movie and then he disappears. Megan Fox, who is touted as one of the stars of the movie, probably has somewhere around ten minutes of screen time. And for most of those ten minutes she is bizarrely lit to make her appearance almost glowing for no real reason. Even the normally hilarious Will Arnett plays the straight man here and his few minutes of screen time seem to belie a larger role. So instead they give much larger roles to

By no stretch of the imagination is this a good movie. But it is passable. For the most part the plot is coherent if underexplained and individually the scenes are entertaining, save for an annoying tattooed Irishman whose sole purpose is apparently to be an obnoxious henchman. I’m most interested in seeing the inevitable extended cut of this, which I venture to guess is at least another half hour long. There just seems to be that much cut out of it. Personally, I’d recommend Toy Story 3 this weekend over this, but if cartoon toys aren’t your thing, you might not feel you wasted too much time if you went to see this instead.

GRADE: C