Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/19/10
Frequent moviegoers tend
to have an opinion when it comes to knowing a movie's running time in advance.
Some violently oppose the idea since they'll have a sense of where in the
story they stand based on how long they've been sitting in their seats.
Others (including me) really want to know how long it's going to be, both
to fit the movie into their day and also because they DO want to know where
in the three-act structure they might stand at any given time. But
with pre-screening your movie's running time comes occasional shocks like
Jonah Hex. This Warner Bros. adaptation of a cult classic
DC comic book clocks in at an almost unthinkably brief 80 minutes, causing
me to scan my brain for a live-action feature that brief that didn't feel
like the skeletal remains of a disastrous production (I did think of one:
Wes Craven's excellent thriller Red Eye). Now, having seen
it, I can't speak for whether its production was a disaster of not, but
Jonah Hex is clearly the skeletal remains of something. Flashbacks,
dream sequences and alternate universes swirl in a haze of “get some use
out of all this footage we shot!” editing, while the “and” acting credit
is reserved for a guy (Michael Shannon) who has at most two lines.
But if you can do the mental persistence of vision trick heavily edited
movies require, there's an undeniable cool to Jonah Hex. Josh
Brolin and John Malkovich give entertainingly outsized performances in
highly quotable roles, and a high-energy score by Marco Beltrami and the
rock group Mastodon runs through the action like a live wire. Jonah
Hex is threadbare, but it's also a fun 80 minutes.
Confederate soldier Jonah
Hex (Josh Brolin) wouldn't go along with the murder of innocent women &
children and killed his best friend Jeb Turnbull (an uncredited Jeffrey
Dean Morgan) in the process. Seeking vengeance, Jeb's father Quentin
Turnbull (John Malkovich) burns Hex's home to the ground with his wife
and son inside and brands Jonah's face. Left for dead, Hex almost
obliges, and is pulled back from The Other Side only by Indian magic, which
leaves him with the power to converse with the dead, albeit “burning” their
souls a bit in the process. Mutilating himself to get rid of Turnbull's
mark, he becomes a bounty hunter when Quentin impolitely perishes in a
fire, depriving him of a mission. The closest thing he has to an
emotional connection is prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox), who pines away for
Hex to settle down. But duty calls when Turnbull resurfaces, having
faked his death and working on a superweapon drawn up by Eli Whitney.
President Grant (Aiden Quinn) knows the magnitude of the threat and has
Lieutenant Grass (Will Arnett) locate Jonah, giving him the assignment
to hunt his arch nemesis down. Hot on Turnbull's trail, Hex learns
the stakes: a diabolical scheme by the Confederate terrorist to make
America's 100th birthday its' last.
Jonah Hex will draw
a lot of comparisons to Wild Wild West, the unfairly maligned Will
Smith vehicle that mixed an Old West setting and a sci-fi plot to assassinate
President Grant. It's never nearly as loopy as West at its'
craziest or as awesome as that movie's Giant Mechanical Tarantula pinnacle,
but Hex does have a willingness to take the Western where few before
it have gone. It's not all crazy stuff either: it's unusual
to see Civil War vets treated as so specifically victims of post traumatic
stress as Jonas, who wears the scars of war for all to see on his mutilated
face, and I also can't recall seeing President Grant played as straight
as Quinn (who's excellent in the role) does. But when it's time for
the craziness, Hex supplies an Eli Whitney invention that shares
little common ground with the Cotton Gin: a two-part superweapon
that fires giant cannonballs and then detonates them like mini nukes with
a glowing sphere. That Whitney was quite a clever guy, since his
machine doesn't just surpass the science of his or Hex's time, but is hard
to even imagine in the context of our own. But it and the ironclad
ship that carries it are great sci-fi creations and allow for a spirited
climax on my favorite movie holiday, the 4th of July.
Brolin is great in a role
that would give any leading man pause: not only does he spend the
movie as uglied-up as a PG-13 rating will allow, but the prosthetic makeup
partially closes his mouth on the right-hand side. But it's a role
that consists of virtually nothing but cool quips, blastin' bad guys and
making out with Megan Fox, so he probably didn't mind the time in the makeup
chair too much. The trailers make the pattern pretty clear:
somebody insults Jonah's face, he kills them and then says something clever
(I'd have flipped the order of those last two, but to each his own).
Not content to merely fire away with the pistols and rifles of the time,
he at one point wields double-barreled Gatling guns mounted to his horse
(the cleverly named Horse) and later goes hog wild with dynamite-firing
crossbows. Malkovich looks like something out of a Civil War General
Look-Alike Contest, but he lives large as possibly the most heinous Confederate
in movie history, seeming to kill ONLY women and children as he presumably
figures the rest will take care of itself. The long-winded Evil Colonel
Sanders speeches roll off his tongue, making this yet another bullet point
for one of Hollywood's most impressive resumes of villainy. Michael
Fassbender is still working on his, but he's also delightfully rotten as
Turnbull's right-hand fiend, a guy so bad even his immortal soul gets an
ass-whoopin' in the end. Fox remains a work in progress, nailing
the action scenes and looking sultry as ever, but struggling to fully engage
with the character as she walks the line between beaten-down and disinterested.
As I mentioned, Jonah
Hex bears the telltale signs of a movie severely edited, and also signs
that the screenplay by noted sickos (I mean that in the most complementary
terms possible) Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor was at least a good bit
more demented than the finished product. The aforementioned Shannon
seems to have taken a good-sized subplot with him to the cutting room floor,
but what remains of him is a bizarre scene where he presides over an Old
West Thunderdome where a musclebound brute does battle against some sort
of mutant snake man with poison venom dripping from his mouth. The
obligatory “healed by the Indians” montage (the Deux ex Indians seem to
be available to bring Hex back from the verge of death whenever necessary)
is all over the place including a crazy moment where a crow crawls out
of Jonah's mouth. And strangest of all is a lengthy fight between
Jonah and Turnbull in some sort of otherworld where Hex is covered in red
sand. The movie keeps cutting back to this whenever it feels that
it's been given an opening, including to very distracting effect during
the climax. And footage of Jonah's civil war origin is divvied out
in odd, small doses, while animation and narration try to fill in the gaps.
To say the least, characters err on the side of underdeveloped, but an
advantage of having a cast full of distinctive stars is that they tend
to make their own backstories for themselves.
Director Jimmy Hayward can
now be said to have as eclectic a two-picture resume as anyone, having
previously helmed the excellent Dr Seuss animated flick Horton
Hears a Who. He keeps the spirits high and the pace lightning-fast,
so no one can argue Hex is a long 80 minutes no matter what they
say about its content. As I mentioned, the score is a blast, and
editors Kent Beyda, Dan Hanley and Fernando Villena do their best to keep
their heads above water, keeping the action and transitions fast and tight
even if the various mystical shot-salvaging can't help but be a mess.
If you're a fan of quippy,
genre-bending action and the kind of movies where blowing on something
will cause it to explode, Jonah Hex has a lot of fun to offer and
certainly won't mess with your tight daily schedule. And if you're
the sort who doesn't like to check the running time before going to the
movies, take my word for it, you didn't fall asleep. And, no, you
weren't high during the Indian Healing sequence. Unless, of course,
you were. |
