Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Chances are this ‘review’ of the movie ‘Jonah Hex’ is going to be longer than the movie itself and this article ain’t gonna be long at all. This flick clocks in at slightly over 70 minutes if you discount the extra ten minutes of closing credits and while I’m usually the last guy who thinks any movie should be longer than it needs to be, I’m guessing that there’s another thirty or forty minutes worth of ‘Jonah Hex’ stuff on the floor of some editing room somewhere. Usually when a movie gets truncated like this, as I’m pretty sure ‘Jonah Hex’ has been artificially truncated, the original print must’ve been some kind of awful. So into the editing room they went, removed all the excess baggage which includes most of the dialog, exposition, character interaction and story elements. Keep the focus on Josh Brolin looking ugly, kept all the explosions and shoot outs and of course keep as much of Megan Fox and her twelve inch waist strolling around in a boustier. What we have left isn’t necessarily something I don’t know we can call a bad movie because, truth be told, it’s barely a movie at all.

Jonah Hex (Brolin) is an old time western bounty hunter with a seriously fooked up grill. The reason Jonah is so damn ugly is because the completely evil confederate General Uriah Turnbull… his real first name is Quentin but I like Uriah so much better… tied my man to a cross, burnt up Jonah’s face and killed his family and made Jonah watch. Uriah didn’t do this thing without cause mind you considering Jonah disobeyed a direct order from the general and killed his only son, and Jonah’s best friend Jeb (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), in the process. Eventually some mystical Native Americans, as if there’s any other kind of Native Americans in movies, rescue Jonah but they only half save his life as the other half of Jonah lives in the darkside and talks to dead people. Now Jonah would like nothing better but to get his revenge against the general but the man died in a house fire before Jonah could get to him.

Guess what, he’s not really dead. No sir, Uriah and his team of evil confederate soldiers, as if there’s any other kind of confederate soldier in movies, have grabbed the WMD plans of Eli Whitney… yep, the cotton gin guy… and are going to destroy the United States and start a new nation called the Uriah Turnbull Consortium. Or something along those lines.

President Grant (Aidan Quinn) knows only one man can stop the General and that would be Jonah Hex. And his prostitute girlfriend Lilah (Fox) who exists in this movie, the way that it ended up, for no other reason than to be captured and held hostage. Will Jonah succeed? I’m guessing he did since I’m a Black guy and I’m not in shackles right now. Yay Jonah!

I am kind of at a loss about what to say in regards to this movie ‘Jonah Hex’ because the main thing that it seems concerned with is getting itself over with. I betcha Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn, Lance Reddick and Wes Bentley went to the big Hollywood premiere of this movie and left wondering where the hell all of their scenes went since I’m sure these actors wouldn’t have signed on if they knew they were only making cameo appearances.

So what we are left with here in the absence of… well… everything, is a series of quick cuts, bright colors, lots and lots of disconnected action sequences and Josh Brolin looking ugly. Watching this movie in its current state I’m curious to see how bad it actually was because Josh Brolin seemed more than up for the task of the character of Jonah Hex as my man sneered and seethed and hated and did it all with the screen presence required of a tough as nails Western Hero.

However outside of Josh Brolin and the explosions there wasn’t much else to the movie. It would’ve been nice to know why this crazy hot prostitute loved Jonah so much or even why the woman was a prostitute in the first place. Why was there an ultimate fighting cage match in this movie featuring one of the monsters from ‘I Am Legend’? Where exactly did those golden atomic bomb balls that I guess Eli Whitney designed come from? Jonah knows Uriah is crazy, disobeys his orders, kills his son and yet was caught completely off guard when Uriah and his crew of nasties shows up on his front porch. Come on Jonah…

There’s a crapload of other stuff left unexplained or just dangling in the wind of this movie that bulls its way through what little exposition it might have had, but we don’t have time to get into all of that since the filmmakers didn’t have time to put it in. I’ve seen examples where gutting your crap movie actually works, and I often give the example of the movie ‘Torque’ which while awful was gutted to the point that it actually became one of my all time favorite guilty pleasures, but not this one. I know ‘Jonah Hex’ is based on a comic book and all… I mean ‘Graphic Novel’… but comics are usually pretty good at laying some groundwork for the fantastical worlds and situations that they exist around. ‘Jonah Hex’ apparently was so bad in its original form they just wanted the pain to end quickly and they did succeed in making that happen.