Jonah Hex

Director: Jimmy Hayward
Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovitch, Megan Fox
Review: 1/2 star (of five)

Jonah Hex is like really cheap booze, like a six-dollar bottle of tequila that gives you a blackout and a hangover without ever giving you a moment of actual pleasure. Actually, the difference between Jonah Hex and six-buck tequila is that at least the six-buck tequila is cheap. This vapid piece of trash will cost you exactly as much as a ticket to Toy Story 3.

Spoilery: Some Stupid Things in Jonah Hex.

The main fact about the Jonah Hex character is that he’s a bounty hunter in the Old West, This film takes place in the Old South, and Hex (mumbled by Josh Brolin) is a bounty hunter for exactly one brief scene.

John Malkovich plays an evil guy who’s evil because then he can make fun evil speeches.

A laughably doe-eyed Ulysses S. Grant decides only Hex can stop Malkovich from releasing a “super weapon” on Washington, D.C., during the first Centennial celebration, declaring, “Mark my words, gentleman, the very fate of our nation may rest on the shoulders of Jonah Hex.” This got an unintended laugh from the audience.

Maybe they were just laughing that Grant was being portrayed as sober.

Grant says the Mexicans have a word for this kind of guy, who pointlessly seeks the destruction of our fair, free nation: “terrorista.”

On his way to fight Malkovich, Hex meets the only black man in the movie, who delivers exposition that explains that Hex, a former Confederate still wearing his tattered uniform a decade after the war ended, sure never liked slavery. He only fought the North ’cause he didn’t like being told what to do. What a relief, fellow modern moviegoers!

The forgiving black man also gives Hex tiny crossbows that fire lit, amazingly aerodynamic sticks of dynamite. Which sounds really cool, but manages not to be.

Hex can talk to dead people. Because he can.

Hex encounters a bare-knuckle boxing match in which one of the boxers appears to be a sort of monster, a Nosferatu-type with a dislocating jaw and ninja fighting skills. Hex leaves the scene without having to fight the monster, and no one ever explains why there’s a Nosferatu-esque bare-knuckle boxer in this movie.

The Malkovich super weapon fires cannon balls that may have some kind of secret ingredient inside (or maybe they don’t). After the cannon balls land, the villain then fires a supernaturally glowing sphere at the place where the balls have fallen, and that triggers a bad CG explosion that can wipe out an entire city. The technology is never explained in any way at all, but we’re told it was invented by Eli Whitney, whose previous hit was the cotton gin.

The movie ends with Grant offering a sheriff’s badge to Hex, saying “America could use a sheriff.” I think the corrupt old drunk is trying to invent the Department of Homeland Security, but Hex tells him countries have sheriffs, and walks off into the sunset. Seriously.

Less Spoilery, But Just As Contemptuous.
John Malkovich has successfully pissed away his talent with hamfisted acting in crap films to such a degree that he makes Nicolas Cage look like a subtle genius at choosing scripts.

The film also features Megan Fox in about three utterly inconsequential scenes in which she plays a prostitute with a 14-inch waist. I had only seen Fox in photos, in which she seemed as boring as a Barbie doll. On film, she’s so boring it’s like she’s not there. Weirdly, the director uses soft focus for all her closeups. What’s the point of hiring a 23-year-old model with no acting chops if she needs her closeups to be in hazy soft focus?

It did not have to be this way. Here’s what the so-called filmmakers had to work with: A former Confederate soldier, hideously scarred, rides the Old West as a ruthless bounty hunter, facing every manner of villainy and horror that wild, lawless period could offer. There’s no reason a talented, intelligent filmmaker couldn’t have made the next Unforgiven out of that. Sadly, no intelligent, talented filmmakers appear to have been involved in the making of Jonah Hex. However, the current DC comic is fantastic, and fans of Westerns and good cartooning are urged to check out any volume in the series.

I imagine that paying for this movie is what it’s like to go to a cheap hooker. Not the kind Megan Fox plays, but a real sad and fucked-up, miserable woman who’s been plying her tragic trade much too long: The movie is joyless in providing the halfhearted echo of what you came for, and afterward you feel just as sad and dirty and dead inside. There’s a logline for you: “Jonah Hex: At least it can’t give you syphilis.”

Addendum: Period Films that Aren’t.
Just for the fun of it, here are things that this movie has in common with last Christmas’ Sherlock Holmes: Both films use established period characters but just decide to tell a loud, modern, half-baked action story. Both films need the villains to be terrorists bent on destroying America (even from England, in the case of Holmes), because apparently that gets American audiences all worked up, or something. Both films like the current vogue for digitally tinting practically an entire movie blue, so the fleshtones “pop,” or something. Both films use stupid, fake science that they never bother to explain, and villains with no motivation beyond “eeeevillll.” Both films feature bare-knuckle boxing. Both films hate their source material and their audience. But only one film has the relentless charisma of Robert Downey Jr. to extract some charm from the tangled mess wrought by the shallow and overcaffeinated hacks of Hollywood.