Jonah Hex

Maybe at one time, Jonah Hex resembled a real movie. Maybe it had a plot that carried it from Point A to Point B. Maybe it had richly developed characters that grew on us through thoughtful dialogue that was written with care. I'm willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, because what's ended up on the screen is so severely edited, butchered, and stitched together that I feel like over half the movie has been lost. Mind you, what I did see did not exactly fill me with the desire to see any more.

The movie that is playing at theaters across the country runs a mere 75 minutes, including previews. This was obviously originally a hard-R that's been edited down beyond recognition to a more "family friendly" PG-13. I'd really like to know what studio head thought this was a wise decision, as this is a very dark, violent, and nasty little movie where mean people do cruel and inhumane stuff to each other in each scene. Why did they feel the need to soften the material, when it just makes it come across as gutless and uninspired? I was also wondering what the mother sitting in the row behind me was thinking when she decided to take her two children (who looked no older than eight) to this movie. What was she thinking during the early scene where Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) rides into town, dragging three corpses on the ground behind him? He presents them to the Sheriff for a bounty. The Sheriff reminds Hex that the criminal gang he was sent after had four members, and refuses to pay for only three. That's when Jonah tosses him a sack with the decapitated head of the fourth member.

Jonah Hex, we learn, was once a Civil War soldier who served under a man named Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). When the War ended, Turnbull went crazy for reasons the movie only briefly hints at (he's upset the South lost), and started shooting up hospitals and killing innocent people. Jonah took a stand, a fight broke out, and he ended up killing Quentin's son. This in turn led to Quentin seeking revenge by killing Jonah's family and horribly disfiguring his face. Scarred emotionally and physically, Jonah now wanders the desert as a gruff bounty hunter who has the supernatural ability to talk to the dead. How did this come about? Best I can understand, he had a near-death experience, and now he suddenly has the ability to interrogate corpses he finds for information. It comes in handy, since the dead seem to hold a lot of information about Quentin's current whereabouts, and his plan to kill the President (Aiden Quinn) with a long lost military weapon.

There's an old flame for Hex in the form of a local prostitute named Lilah (Megan Fox). We don't know anything about their past together, and the movie's not very keen on dispensing the information. So we get a lot of scenes where Fox stares vacantly into space, which I guess is supposed to symbolize she's falling for him. She also constantly slips in and out of her shaky Southern accent, making some of her dialogue hard to understand. No matter. She serves no real role in the plot. Neither does anyone else, for that matter. Jonah just wanders around the desert, killing everyone in sight, until he tracks down his nemesis. There are a lot of inexplicable scenes along the way, none more so than a sequence occurring at a fighting arena that comes out of nowhere, and doesn't seem to go anywhere. Scenes seem to start and stop at random, sometimes failing to clue us in as to where it fits in the plot itself.

I'm dying to know who Jonah Hex is made for. Is there an audience for movies that make no attempt to tell a coherent story, or characters who have not a shred of personality? I know the character is based on a comic book, which has gone unread by me. It'd be more appropriate if the inspiration were a video game, which is what it more closely resembles. People keep on popping up like in a shooting gallery, and Jonah keeps on blowing them away. It's all very repetitive and mindless. None of the action is shot all that well to start with, so we end up watching a bunch of talented actors who look like they could use a long, hot bath shooting at each other over and over. Everything else in the movie is devoted entirely to exposition dialogue that somehow ends up making us more confused than before.

As I struggled to pay attention to what was unfolding up on the screen, I realized I was fighting a losing battle. Jonah Hex is a movie without rhyme, reason, or purpose. It's sort of impressive in a technical sense, but it's at the service of a movie that's been cut and butchered beyond recognition. My thoughts once again turn to the mother in the row behind me. What possessed her to take her kids to see this over Toy Story 3 or The Karate Kid? Those are movies with heart and imagination. This is an ugly, violent little nothing of a movie that has nothing to offer anyone.

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