Jonah Hex

In 1985, DC Comics cancelled Jonah Hex, one of the last--if not the last--Western comic books that was still being published by that point. Considering that DC really no longer had need for a 19th century gunfighter, by all rights, Jonah Hex should have faded into the ether along with the company's other Old West characters like Bat Lash, Cinnamon, Scalphunter, etc., until there was a story where Superman time-traveled into the past and they ran into each other or something.

But DC had another idea. Westerns may have faded in popularity in this country by the 80s, but sci-fi was huge. So DC decided to take Jonah Hex and send him into a post-apocalyptic future that looked an awful like The Road Warrior.

From a "gut-wrenching" final issue to a "gut-searing" first issue. More adjectives should be preceded with the word "gut." Anyway, all things being equal, it was an incredibly undignified way for a classic comic book character to be treated, and it wasn't long before Hex was sent back to the Old West, and even though it took a while, is once again starring in his own series.

But that was nothing compared to this indignity:

If you'd told me two days ago that there was a movie that couldn't be at least partially redeemed by Megan Fox's thighs, I would have called you a damn liar. But it's true. They do provide the most thrilling parts of the film, but even the biggest Megan Fox stalker would have been hard-pressed to sit through the rest of it.

Here's a list of all the critically-panned comic book movies that are better than Jonah Hex: Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Steel. Spider-Man 3. Catwoman. Daredevil. Ghost Rider. Batman & Robin. Yep. You heard me. Jonah Hex is worse than Batman & Robin. That's not a statement anyone should make lightly, but there it is.

Like most comic book films made by filmmakers who think they're smarter than people who create comic books, Jonah Hex fails primarily because of the arbitrary and completely unnecessary changes made to the character. In the comic, angry Indians, not John Malkovich, give Hex his facial scar. But I guess that would have triggered a protest or two, so it had to go. Also, Hex has no magic powers. If he touches a dead body? It doesn't suddenly come back to life. His horse doesn't have saddle-mounted gatling guns. He doesn't have a Q-like arms maker who gives him pistols that shoot sticks of dynamite. He's never had to save Washington from glowing mini-nuke balls.

No, he generally just goes around, being a bad-ass gunfighter with a dark sense of humor. And geez, who'd want to see a movie like that?

The animated bit in the beginning (I'll bet the director thought he was throwing a bone to comic book readers with that) was awful. I'm not going to say that a character's origin isn't usually the dullest part of any comic book film, but you can't just gloss over it entirely by cramming as much exposition into thirty seconds as possible. The stylistic dream sequences that appear throughout the film were even worse. If we're seeing Hex fight Malkovich in "real life," why are we also watching him fight Malkovich in his dream sequence? Usually, dream sequences like that are supposed to serve as some sort of metaphor. But a dream fight scene intercut with another fight scene isn't a metaphor, it's just repetitive.

On paper, the cast looks great. On film, not so much. Josh Brolin might have been an okay Hex with a better script, but here, he always seemed half-asleep. Megan Fox is barely in the film, which, amazingly, is probably a good thing. You can only have so many scenes of her slowly putting her stockings on. John Malkovich must have gambling debts that needed to be paid off, because about this time two years ago, the man was in a Coen Brothers film. Will Arnett can't do drama. I mean, maybe he can. But I think his comedic work has ruined him for any sort of serious role, because I kept waiting for him to be funny and got more and more annoyed when he wasn't. And Wes Bently...I actually had to go to the IMDB to verify that was, in fact, Wes Bently, because I didn't believe it. The guy was in American Beauty. What happened to him? He's in two really brief scenes here, and in both of them, he gets beat up by Malkovich. It didn't feel like a cameo, either. This is probably a role he had to audition for. Needless to say, it's a huge step down from even playing the bad guy in Ghost Rider.

The stupidest sequence comes when it's time for the part that's in almost every comic book film, where the hero has been wounded by the bad guys. Hex is riding his horse, half-dead, having been shot a few times. He falls off the horse, and is dragged off-screen by his feet. We suddenly see him surrounded by Indian medicine men, and it was such an abrupt, nonsensical cut, I thought the film had shifted into yet another flashback explaining how he got his powers to speak with the dead. He suddenly wakes up, a crow flies out of his mouth, and in the very next shot, he's seen racing away to stop Malkovich and his secret weapon from blowing up D.C. Then I realized it wasn't a flashback, and in the span of about a minute, the film just waved away all those bullet wounds.

It never ceases to amaze me how, with films based on Marvel characters, the filmmakers usually decide to make the film appeal to comic book readers first, and trust everyone else will show up. Warner Brothers usually takes the opposite approach, catering their films to some hypothetical audience that WB has yet to prove exists, that wants to see a Catwoman who has nothing to do with Catwoman, or Superman as a deadbeat dad, or now, a cowboy with magic powers.

This is a terrible, terrible, terrible film. This whole post in general, and my invoking Batman & Robin in particular, probably gave you that impression, but I want to be absolutely clear. Before seeing Jonah Hex yesterday, I watched When In Rome, an insipid romantic comedy that seemed to have been written by a computer that had been fed a list of romantic comedy cliches, and ordered to incorporate all of them into its script. (Oddly enough, Will Arnett is in that one, too. But at least he's trying to be funny in that one.) As bad as When In Rome is, Jonah Hex makes it look like a Best Picture nominee.

One of my favorite parts of doing this blog is at the end of the year when I do my Best & Worst Of lists, and I sit down to figure out what, among other things, was the absolute worst movie of the year. Jonah Hex has robbed me of even that simple pleasure, as there's absolutely no possibility whatsoever that a worse film will come out in 2010.

In closing, let me just say that this film makes a good argument for the return of McCarthyism, because there are clearly some people in Hollywood who need to be blacklisted. And they can all be found in the closing credits of Jonah Hex.