The doomed production of Jonah Hex—beset by early budget cuts, directed by a man whose only experience is in computer animation, and written by the esteemed duo of Neveldine and Taylor (credited sans the oh-so-superfluous Christian names), the talents behind the dialogue-dependant Crank series and last year’s prisoner-as-videogame-avatar talkie Gamer—failed before it even hit the big screen, and the final product provides ample evidence of just that.
The film begins with the eponymous bounty hunter’s back-story, a half-assed montage of comic-esque animation set to the anachronous heavy-metal score by Mastodon to reassure us that yes, what we are seeing is, in fact, hardcore. During the Civil War, Brolin’s Hex was faced with a moral dilemma that ended in him killing his best friend, the son of General Turnbull (Malkovich), who then exacts revenge on Hex by killing his family in front of him and branding Hex’s right cheek. In case you missed this, the driving force behind Hex’s vengeance crusade, the film flashes back to Turnbull’s initial revenge not once, but twice in an effort to pad its 80-minute running time.
The scattershot mishmash of the supernatural (Hex speaks with the dead), the doubly wild west and the popular theme of terrorism, makes for a movie that would already be hard to sell without the myriad problems that Jonah Hex compounds on top.
Nearly every scene of this film feels unfinished, and the rapid-fire editing is like a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound—real messy. Chock it up to budget cuts and time restraints, but even more time couldn’t have improved the performances. Megan Faux, “Yawn” Malkovich, an oddly cast Will Arnett, a slumming Aidan Quinn, and even honorary Goonie Josh Brolin all seem as bored with the material as I was. Only Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) seems to be enjoying himself as a drinking-song-singing, tattooed, Irish sociopath.
Somewhere in the muck of this incongruous series of shots there is a decent movie to be made. As it stands however, Jonah Hex comes off as a comic-book movie cash-grab that no one took the time to truly develop, and thus, won’t make much money after all. Vengeance is sweet.
