The Kidd Vs. Jonah Hex

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CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD

I wish I could say that the reason I didn’t enjoy JONAH HEX was due to the projectionist’s inability to properly frame the movie on the screen, giving us an awkward picture vertically of stretched people doing stretched things, which only made for some disorienting attempts at action. However, that was the least of the film’s problems, as JONAH HEX is a blistering 90 minutes that never takes the time for any character or their motivation to take hold in order to give you a story that actually makes sense. And believe me… the running time is something the movie has going in its favor, because had JONAH HEX lasted one minute longer, it would have quickly shifted from pointless to painful.

Each scene seems to be more pointless than the one before it, serving as filler to get the running time at least over an hour, as we move towards the inevitable showdown between villain Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, in perhaps his most useless role yet), who murdered the title character’s wife and child as revenge for his son being killed, and Jonah Hex, who is now out for vengeance for his family but also for his scarred face. Everything between the opening of the film, which sets up their hatred for one another, and the ending of the film is meaningless. If the movie would have been those two scenes, JONAH HEX might have been a much tighter, but more importantly, a better film, because it’s the entire middle of the flick that adds nothing to the overall package. How can you have an entire movie where the body, the meat and potatoes, the dead center is irrelevant to what happens in the movie?

To give you an idea of how bad things get, Megan Fox’s purpose in JONAH HEX is to be a hooker who gets all of two scenes, only one with Jonah Hex himself, before she is captured and thrown into the typical damsel-in-distress slot, which causes the scarred anti-hero to sacrifice himself for no harm to come to her, because we’re absolutely supposed to believe that he cares a great deal for her in the minute-and-a-half they get to spend together in front of us, including an implied sex scene we don’t get to see.

But wait… it gets better. Turnbull wants revenge against the United States, too, for some reason that didn’t resonate with me enough to even bother remembering (probably because it didn’t make much sense), and he’s gone off to build a weapon that’ll cause war throughout the nation, wiping out entire towns and cities with the equivalent of the Western version of a nuclear weapon. And what’s the name of this deadly destructive weapon…? The Weapon.

Seriously… I can’t even make this shit up.

Make sure you throw in a bizarre Indian revival sequence that has Jonah Hex brought back from the dead by having a crow flying out of his mouth with the ability of Jonah Hex to talk to the dead, which never really factors into the story other than for exposition purposes, and you’ve got this mess of a movie.

I almost feel bad for Josh Brolin for being locked up in this horrendous film, because he’s easily the best thing to come from JONAH HEX, with his snarky comments towards attackers that lends some bit of planned comic relief to a movie that’s unintentionally funny for all the wrong reasons. I’m pretty sure all conclusions on JONAH HEX can come right around the point when Brolin kills one of his enemies and remarks that he was all out of smart-ass comments for that guy. Really…? The lazy writers couldn’t come up with enough sarcastic catchphrase material to last the full 90 minutes…? That’s a damn shame.

I wish I could say that I also felt bad for Megan Fox for being a part of this, but I really can’t. If it proves that she can’t act worth a damn, JONAH HEX at least gives her cover for one more movie, because she doesn’t have anything to do here at all that puts her skills or talents on display. She talks to Jonah Hex, she fights off a potential rapist, she gets captured, and then she shoots a gun. There… that’s about the total of her appearance summed up as succinctly as possible. She’s just not in the movie enough to make any kind of impact, and, when a movie can’t even take the time to show off the attractiveness of its lead actress, you know strange things are a-foot.

I wish I knew where the blame lies on such a clusterfuck of a movie. I can’t really point it at the original writers and directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, but they skipped out on JONAH HEX nearly two years ago due to “creative differences,” which means they saw the writing on the wall long before us. Director Jimmy Hayward could get some fingers pointed at him, but there’s no telling how much of his vision is reflected in the final cut, and what he was handed over from before. And who knows how many different writers were brought on throughout, to take a shot at shaping this picture, and what pieces were taken from each?

I’ll take comfort in putting this one on the shoulders of producers Akiva Goldsman and Andrew Lazar, who’ve been involved in this movie from beginning to end, and should have known how shitty JONAH HEX was turning out to be, especially before they served it up to us, hoping we might like it. Shame on those two bastards for ruining a perfectly good comic book property (reboot, anyone?) and giving us a severely inferior movie to anything else I’ve seen this summer.

If you really want to enjoy JONAH HEX as the character was meant to be, your best bet might be to round up a bunch of books from the DC Comics series, and read them cover-to-cover for a good hour-and-a-half. The last thing you want to do is set foot in a theatre playing the film version, because this poor attempt at a comic book Western will only serve to fuck you… and the horse you rode in on.

Tags: john malkovich • jonah hex • josh brolin • megan fox • movie reviews • The Kidd Vs