JONAH HEX 3/4
Warner Bros., Rated PG-13
Out the same day as Toy Story 3 and an alternative for those with a preference for dark movies sans sugar, Jonah Hex is a blast from the past as it storms into theaters with a vengeance. The total opposite of cuddly cowboy Woody, Josh Brolin, as the titular supernatural gunslinger, is a very different kind of settler, dodging bullets across the Deep South, settling both old scores and new ones that may not even exist.
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In keeping with the perpetually mythologized U.S. cowboy conventions, though subversively updated, Jonah Hex, as originally conceived by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga and now directed in its cinematic incarnation by Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears A Who!), rides into town back and forth across centuries and war genres, as a kind of undead, born-again vigilante.
Josh Brolin stars in Jonah Hex
When we meet up with Hex, he’s a disgruntled Confederate vet seemingly in the grip of post-traumatic stress syndrome following defeat in the Civil War. Blamed for the death of a fellow soldier by the deceased man’s thuggish dad Turnbull (John Malkovich), Hex watches helplessly as the homicidal brute kills his wife and son and disfigures his face with a hot cattle brand.
Dispatched briefly to the afterlife and then returned to the land of the living, Hex discovers an inherent talent for visiting graves and awakening the dead. He puts his talent to use as a bounty hunter while resisting any taming by the U.S. military when in search of information to track down Turnbull. Along the way, he sabotages the occupying forces of the Union Army in the South by perfecting a premature dirty bomb and stages train robberies with hooded suicide bombers.
Meanwhile, Megan Fox appears intermittently as the pistol-packing hooker Lilah, likely based on the Jonah Hex comic’s Tallulah Black, who in print was Hex’s lover and would eventually become a bounty hunter herself.
With an abbreviated running time of 80 minutes, too short to delve deeply enough into the dramatic material at hand, Jonah Hex zigzags between past and future episodes in the life of its seething protagonist, unable to make up its mind as to a clear path to lead this film on the way to the final showdown, which provides only a tangy taste of this defiant anti-hero, as opposed to a fully satisfying encounter.
