Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Oh man, here's the thing... I just can't even put into words... it's just... have you ever seen a movie where literally every single actor except for the lead has been horribly miscast? Welcome to JONAH HEX. And Josh Brolin is a great actor, but... ah crap... when Megan Fox is only about the fifth-worst thing in your movie, you have real... and then there are these glowing, explosive oranges... and then, at the end, there's this totally unexplained fight sequence between Brolin's Hex and John Malkovich as the bad guy in the red desert... but then I saw Michael Shannon's name in the credits, but almost nobody saw him in the movie and then when someone told me which character he was, I said, "But that dude only had one line! What the fuck?! Why is his name so high up in the end credits?"
And then this dude I'm pretty sure was Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows up, but I wasn't sure it was him because his name isn't in the credits. Then there's this scene in the Civil War-era White House where I'm pretty sure Aidan Quinn is playing Ulysses S. Grant and Will Arnett was playing some military dude, but it was hard to hear what they were saying because the audience was laughing so hard.
And then Wes Bentley shows up, and I was like, "Holy shit, I haven't seen this guy since AMERICAN BEAUTY. Where the hell did they dig him up?" And then I thought, oh, maybe Jonah Hex used his power to bring the dead back to life momentarily to revive Wes Bentley's career. And then I started thinking about how Jonah Hex's power is a lot like that guy Ned on "Pushing Daisies," only Ned didn't have a giant burn scar on half his face, and I know JONAH HEX came before "Pushing Daisies," so shut up. And then I started thinking how strange it was that a studio paid Brolin a decent amount of money only to hide his good-looking face under all that scar makeup.
But then at the beginning of the film there is this cool sort-of animated sequence used to explain Hex's origin, and I started thinking that I wish the whole movie had been made that way because I kind of dug that part. And then Malkovich kills Hex's family as revenge and he says to a tied-up Hex, "I want you to see this," but then he closes the door so Hex can't see his family die, which makes no goddamn sense. And then there's this dude who can spit snake venom and has a messed-up face, and he's fighting in a cage match sort of thing. And then I started thinking about Megan Fox again, whose basically in this movie to keep the whole thing from being a total sausage party, and I actually felt kind of sorry for her because JENNIFER'S BODY should have worked, and it's not entirely her fault that it didn't.
And, man, am I excited to see Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's WALL STREET sequel and the new Woody Allen movie and the Coen Brothers' TRUE GRIT, and I remember thinking "Mr. Sterling" was a decent show, and how when I got to interview him for NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, he snatched my notebook of questions and started laughing because I had an Into the Blue question that I wasn't even going to ask but he insisted on answering. He was a truly cool dude, and you hate to see the nice guys stumble like this, but the law of averages says it's bound to happen, and the guy has had a run over the last five years or so that is second only to Pixar, so one piece of shit isn't going to derail him in the slightest.
And if anything that I'm writing about JONAH HEX seems slightly like incomprehensible rambling, try sitting through the movie. Your standard for incomprehensible will undoubtedly be altered. And if the people who made this movie didn't bother to try and make sense, why the hell should I? To say I hated this movie would imply that anything in my soul was stirred enough to form an emotion. I could feel my brain literally throwing out the memories of the first half of the movie as I sat through the second half. And if you think that the film's abbreviated running time (right around 80 minutes with credits) will dull the pain of watching it, guess again. No film in recent memory feels more like a studio came in, saw what a mess they had at 90 or 100 minutes, and they simply took a chainsaw into the editing room to try to make something out of it before they pushed it out the door like a gay son in a Mormon household. There are so many good movies coming out this weekend that if you actually spend money to see JONAH HEX , you deserve all the pain you will inevitably suffer.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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