He's gonna Hex you up

Jonah Hex

Based on the DC comics character and comic of the same name, Jonah Hex is a big budget, supernatural, sci fi, revenge western that was meddled with by the studio, trimmed down to just over seventy minutes, and then dropped in to the 2010 summer movie season…only to land with a leaden thud before quickly disappearing in to obscurity. The critics derided it and audiences avoided it.

Gotta say...I thought it was pretty good fun, some perfectly enjoyable hokum.

Sure, the script was unoriginal but it flowed well enough and mostly made sense. Mostly. Josh Brolin was pretty good, all gruff and growly as the damaged and vengeance seeking Jonah while Megan Fox was hot and spunky as Lilah, the hooker with a soft spot for him (though her role serves no real purpose other than eye candy to be rescued). Michael Fassbender was a suitably nasty-but-charming henchman and John Malkovich, who came in for a lot of stick for being over the top with plenty of scene chewery was also perfectly fine in what was in reality a fairly standard Malkovich bad guy role. The action was standard fare with the usual build up to a big show down and explosions at the finale but it was watchable with some reasonably good FX. And any film with a horse armed with dual gatling guns you gotta give props to.

Jonah Hex’s biggest problem is that it is light weight and utterly unoriginal drawing on all sorts of movies and comic books while adding nothing much of its own. Still, it’s brisk and reasonably entertaining and was far, far better than the intensely dull tedium of Resident Evil: Afterlife, the film I watched immediately prior. In contrast, the experience of watching Jonah Hex was like watching Toy Story 3. Bliss. (3/5)