Jonah Mess

As Jonah Hex's closing credits rolled I turned to my friend and fellow comic book movie fan Rick.  His face had the look of "what the hell just happened?!?!"

As we tried to contextualize the film (makes Ghost Rider look like The Dark Knight?) the end music, care of the band Mastodon, continued.  "Why couldn't any of this be up there on the screen?" I asked, pointing to thin air?  I was suggesting the energy, the enthusiasm, the drive, the sense of purpose evident in the quite terrific music.  Jonah Hex, an under eighty minute gurgle of cinematic spittle, barely even qualifies as a movie.  It is a suggestion of a movie, one that might have even been good had the people involved had any awareness of how to tell a story.  

Josh Brolin's scarred Western anti-hero rides onto the screen figuring that we've already seen The Outlaw Josey Wales and High Plains Drifter and that we'll just project our understanding of those two characters onto him.  It doesn't work that way.  Hex's backstory is diced up and served in microscopic scenes under opening credits, music and animation.  I'm all for mixed-media, but this reeks of excised scenes mashed together to try and speed toward the main story.

Funny concept, that, considering once the story does get rolling it involves lots of repetition.  Jonah Hex really hates John Malkovich's Quentin Turnbull (he killed his family, burnt his face and, we learn, is a terrorist) and he really likes Megan Fox's Lilah.  Lilah plays a hooker with a heart of. . .well, actually, I don't really know if she does have a heart of gold.  In fact, I don't know anything about her.  All I know is that she never gets out of her, um, work clothes and knows how to pick locks and stab people.  She has no goals, no motivation, but, heck, when the cameras are on her, at least I wasn't thinking about the chores I had waiting for me at home.

One or two other moments reached this elevated stature of not-completely-awful.  I enjoyed the supernatural elements (oh, did I mention Hex is kinda-sorta undead?  If I did, it is because the movie doesn't know what to do with this fact, either.)  Jonah's conversations with the deceased have an extremely mundane quality that I'll be generous and call Jarmuschian.  I also enjoyed the absurd moments of unexlained steampunk influence.  Malkovich plans to destroy Washington with these glowy orange spheres that harness the power of God-knows-what, and he hurls them from this giant clockwork contraption off an ironside ship replete with a Captiol-building shaped scope!

I did not enjoy the two random fight sequences (one in a "gaming parlor," the other, literally, in Limbo) that resembled outtakes from I Am Legend.  I also didn't like how Michael Shannon had one line (a sentence fragment, really) and how David Patrick Kelly was cut from the picture entirely.  But at least the audience and I got a chance to lol and slap our foreheads when Lance Reddick showed up for a quick minute to remind us that Hex, despite wearing Confederate Gray, "never supported slavery" but just didn't like the government telling him what to do.  

I like Josh Brolin.  I love Westerns.  I enjoyed the one Jonah Hex trade paperback I've read.  This movie, however, to put it in a vernacular it deserves, sucks.  Brolin is trying to be cool, but he just comes off like a clown.  The picture simply isn't fun.  It is, however, fun in a "bad movie night" kinda way, if that is any consolation.