Jonah Hex is the worst kind of bad movie. For one, it’s not something you can laugh at it. It also had a vast amount of potential. Everything on paper should have made it gangbusters: Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex, Michael Fassbender present and of course having solid source material to take cue from. Instead of reaching its fullest grand potential, it’s a ponderous train wreck. It’s like 80 minutes of watching someone throw gold off a cliff. Yes, it’s that bad.
This review won’t be a comparison to the comic. That’d just be mean and redundant. But a major difference must be aired: the newer volumes of Jonah Hex are real genuine westerns. They feel authentic and works as total homages. Here, it’s not that at all. This couldn’t be more of a made-by-committee type of film. They tried to keep it grounded in the Western realm, but failed miserably. It’s an action movie by all accounts that doesn’t resemble anything great about the comics or the genre. It’s like a twelve-year-old’s wet dream of a Western: hot woman, nonstop action and a cool, grisly lead at the center of it.
Even those generic ingredients easily could have made for at the very least a dumb fun action film, but it even can’t meet that standard. Warner Bros.’s promotion didn’t set the bar very high and it doesn’t even come close to being a passable summer blockbuster. The action is so poorly constructed it’s completely incomprehensible and void of exhilaration.
It’s not fun watching Mr. Hex take down a bunch of guys or blowing things up. Why would it be when you can barely follow what he’s doing? The action also feels incredibly watered down. The film doesn’t have to be gratuitous in terms of violence, but coherent enough to follow. There’s just never a sense of genuine danger.
Poor action can be forgiven, but the sloppy storytelling is unforgivable. It jumps from plot point to point in a hurry to get to a “big” finale that couldn’t have been more underwhelming. Within the first two minutes it’s apparent that this isn’t going to work. It starts off with hammy narration and a cringe-inducing, staged origin story of Hex. It shows him fighting in the Civil War and looks like something akin to a History Channel reenactment.
It’s as clunky as the rest of the film, all of it moving at a sluggish pace. Even at a bare 80 minutes, it’s excruciating. Jimmy Hayward‘s direction is aimless. Even standard conversations are shot awkwardly. He or whoever else is to blame didn’t seem to know what type of movie to make.
The list of what went wrong goes on and on. Brolin doesn’t work as the title character. He has his moments, but seems uncomfortable in the makeup and doesn’t quite find the right tone. He ranges from brooding to campy. Just like the rest of the film, he’s all over the place. It never knows what it wants to be, a serious comic book movie or a Roger Corman-esque camp-fest.
It’s completely jarring. As for the rest of the cast, they are wasted. Fassbender is the only one who seems to be having fun. At times, you wish his sidekick to Turnball (Hex’s nemesis played by John Malkovich) would just kill off both the leads so it’d be over. Fassbender strikes the perfect tone and even with nothing to do he delivers an enjoyable performance. Fox and Malkovich, on the other hand, are forgettable. It’s hard to say they’re bad considering they are given nothing to do.
There’s no real need to describe the plot considering the film itself doesn’t even seem to care. It seems so invested in delivering on the action and yet fails at even that. This isn’t funny at all. It’s good source material butchered and thrown up on screen in a rushed job. Apparently there’s a longer cut out there – 20 minutes to be precise – but it’s doubtful it would do much. Unless it adds enough exposition to find a voice, fixes all of the pacing issues, inputs genuine character traits, offers cohesive action and is full of all of the good one-liners a film like this should have, it won’t do much to help the final product. In the end, Jonah Hex just feels like another Ghost Rider.