Movie: Jonah Hex

• Director: Jimmy Hayward
• Release Date:
• Writers: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
• Run Time: 80
• Genre: Action, Drama, Thriller, Western

Tagline: Revenge Gets Ugly

Review: Im hesitant to call this an out and out terrible movie as some have labelled it simply because it was mildly entertaining. Theres a lot of action, some cool ideas, a great performance by Josh Brolin and the short 80 minute running time doesn hurt it either.

The sad truth of the whole thing is that it just didn come close to its potential. For starters, Jonah Hex didn have to be macabre and supernatural…to my knowledge this wasn even part of the original comic books that the movie is based on. The original story is simple, Jonah Hexs family is murdered, hes horribly scarred and left for dead. He gets better and sets out for revenge. Its a pretty classic western tale…one that weve seen before but given the general lack of western movies these days, that doesn matter…theres plenty of room in theatres for a fun out for revenge Western. Having said all that, the supernatural ideas that they came up with are actually kinda cool, and I wouldve been happy to see them mixed in, if only theyd been handled better. Instead these elements seem tossed in as an excuse to include CG effects that the box office loves oh so much.

The end result is an unfortunate mash up of a good ideas…that maybe couldve worked if more time had been put into development, it feels like it was either slapped together too hastily or suffered from a massive reedit…during most of the film I couldn shake the feeling that there was maybe a 2 hour+ directors cut lying on the floor somewhere which may or may not be a superior and more coherent film. I was looking forward Jonah Hex based on a short appearance he had in a Batman cartoon years ago…from that alone I thought the character had a lot of movie potential but I was let down. Brolins performance is the best part of the movie. Malkovich is good but nothing too spectacular considering his track record, and even Megan Fox is half decent but she doesn have a lot to do with her pretty much useless character.