FILM REVIEW Jonah Hex

A bunch of cowboys made this

15 * 81 mins * 3 September 2010
Director: Jimmy Hayward
Cast: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Michael Shannon, Michael Fassbender, Aidan Quinn

It was always going to be a dicey proposition. Take a character that few outside of comics fandom have ever heard of: DC Comics’ gothic/spaghetti Western anti-hero, a man with a tragic past, a terrible facial scar and a brush with death that left him able to chat with corpses. Fling it through years of torturous development for both the big and small screen. Then cook up a cinematic version that plays musical chairs with the talent behind the camera and ends up heavily reshot and a scant 80 minutes long.

The warning flames have been drifting across the pond for a few months now after Jonah Hex crashed and burned at the US box office, dragging in one of the lowest totals of the year. And it’s not really surprising – given how dead on arrival this thing is, you’d need Hex’s supernatural ability to make much sense of it.

Here, the character is played by Josh Brolin as a bitter, facially twisted bounty hunter with few rules and even less concern for how he brings in his targets. A Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, he’s asked by the new US government to hunt down Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), a man who hates the current state of play in his country and is looking to deploy a new cannonball-shooting super weapon in the spirit of domestic terrorism. Despite giving it all the Eastwood grit he can muster, Brolin seems mostly uncomfortable as Hex, while Megan Fox is reduced to looking good in corsets as hooker-with-a-clichéd-golden-heart Lila.

The result is a thin broth that comes off more Wild Wild West than Sergio Leone, with the brief running time standing as a testament to how badly it’s been handled. None of the cast seems to know what film they were making and director Jimmy Hayward (a former Pixar man whose prior directing credit was Horton Hears A Who!) never manages to wrangle much entertainment out of the seemingly meaty source material.

A serious misfire, Jonah Hex should stand as a warning to anyone looking to keep the trend for comic book-to-movie translations from falling back into disrepute.

Jim Blakey