"Get lost or get dead."
Jonah Hex (2010) is a (kinda) horror western action movie loosely based on a comic book character. Jonah Hex almost died once, and as a result he can communicate with the dead.
Props to this movie for using real prosthetic on Jonah's face (and later his bullet wounds), could've looked a lot worse if they tried to do it in CG. And for what it's worth I liked Jonah's special ability, even if it wasn't used in the coolest way... I liked the idea behind it. I was surprised that this is actually not something from the comics but invented for the film!
Overall the direction and especially sound design in the action sequences was pretty entertaining. I found it caught my attention and kept me interested when usually I don't like action scenes at all.
First and foremost this film has a TON of exposition, and I mean PACKED! The film starts with 6 minutes of backstory and exposition shoved down your throat! The movie's only 80 minutes long! You could have taken the time to show us that backstory and it could have only take 20 more minutes! He'll meet characters along the way then they'll bring up how they know each other and talk about things just to establish that they exist in the most poorly written way ever! This would be fine if it happened once but this happens literally every time someone is introduced. If I ever watch this film again it'll be with a stopwatch in hand, in order to find out what percentage of this film is just bad exposition! (Spoilers: it's a lot!)
The story in this movie is really not all that interesting. There's really not much more than the fact that he's after John Malkovitch's character, who by the way really must be the most boring and uninteresting antagonist ever seen on film (or at least near the bottom of the list). But it's not just for his own personal revenge for some reason the U.S. Government wants him and hires Hex to do a job that he already wanted to do?
It's hard to get a good feel for how this world works, yeah I get the spiritual or undead, magical aspect of it but then the weapon technology isn't integrated well at all... that and the weapons are supposed to be really clever I think? But end up just coming across as really really dumb. They don't make sense, they aren't cool and they are revealed in a way that they're supposed to be really cool... which just makes them look worse.
I'm a fan of one-liners but this movie overdoes it! Everything that comes out of Hex's mouth is a poorly written, "trying to be cool" one-liner. It's bad. And it's not just his character, probably whatever is left of the script that's not bad exposition... is bad one-liners, from everyone! Also it's obvious that Josh Brolin has a hard time talking under the facial prognostics which makes his dialogue pretty hard to understand sometimes... why didn't they just dub over it? Seems like a pretty normal practice. You can't even understand his bad one-liners!
Thank god there's little CG in this film, because when it's used it's very bad.
Two magnificent things about this film, one how did a script this bad ever get green lit? Second it's sad that the amount of really amazing actors that are in this movie couldn't overcome it's really bad script. I mean if Josh Brolin, John Malkovitch, Michael Fassbender and Michael Shannon couldn't save this script, nothing can.
Jonah Hex (2010) is a pretty mindless movie, but the direction is passable and the some of the characters are almost interesting enough to warrant a watch... let's just say it's not the worst movie I've ever seen. 2/5 stars.
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