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Jonah Hex

I love revenge/justice movies, I like Josh Brolin and I like Westerns. Yet this movie made me fall asleep a few times.

Character

A truly dysfunctional movie shows its flawz early on. One of the most important things in any movie is for the audience to empathize with the main character. Here, Jonah Hex’s own narration told us that he did bad things, so why should I have cared about him?

Structure / Plot

The opening origin story was too fast and condensed. The two minutes should have been ten. Hex’s background was confusing…what exactly did he do wrong? That guilt shaped his character so it should have been specific. And the comic book montage was ridiculous. I was there to see a movie!

At some point in the middle or so, we learned that Hex disobeyed orders about burning a hospital (in the story’s background period with Turnbull). This should have been shown in the setup and then the story should have omitted any mention of wrongdoing by Hex. Look at the character had that happened: tough guy loses everything because of his morals. That’s a classic character audiences understand and love!

Premise

The part of Hex’s scar where skin bridged his lip and chin was too much. I remember reading how Johnny Depp, in preparation for the first Pirates of The Caribbean, wanted to have all his teeth look gold and it took a producer or the director (I forget who it was) to convince him that it would be a distraction, that the audience would focus on his teeth and not him. Same problem with Hex- that string of skin distracted me from the character.

Please don’t write saying, “But that’s how the character is in the comics!” I don’t know anything about this comic and don’t care. Movies have their own rules and this is an element to which the creators did not need to be faithful.

What if?

On the same note, the fantasy elements were out of place. Hex communicating with the dead because he was once close to death was actually an interesting idea, but showing the dead momentarily coming to life was silly. And some visuals would have been necessary to establish this at the time he nearly died.

Better executed, I would have accepted this one fantasy element. But then there was that Snake Man and…I think something else…all this time writing about nonsense has drained me. A movie cannot present the real world as we know it and say that various make-believe scenarios exist. It’s either a fantasy where the whole world is largely different or a What if? where it’s the real world with only one make-believe element.

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