Bad Movie Tuesday: Jonah Hex

This movie never had a chance.

Even fellow moviesfilmsandflix writer John Leavengood couldn’t find positives in this film.  “I hadn’t felt so much regret since the last time I ate a Hot Pocket. I couldn’t even find a way to enjoy writing a scathing review about it.”

I’ve decided to write a review about how it went comically wrong.

1. The directors of Crank left the movie two weeks before filming because the script wasn’t good. When the directors of Crank and Drive Angry leave a film because the writing is bad you know you have a problem.

2. The directing duo were replaced by the guy who directed the animated film Horton Hears a Who. Think about this. Joe Johnston (Captain America, The Rocketeer) was given only two weeks to prepare for The Wolfman. Johnston is a great director and  made a subpar flick with two weeks prep. The poor Horton guy’s only hope was to film something coherent that could be edited together. He didn’t succeed.

3. The script wasn’t even finished when production started and it features a Confederate soldier who can talk to dead people. He also has to deal with an odd accented Megan Fox and do battle with  a worringly bloated John Malkovich.

In a nerdtastic perfect world this film should have been great.  A western/sci-fi combo that starred Josh Brolin, Michael Fassbender, John Malkovich, Will Arnett, Megan Fox, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Wes Bentley, Aidan Quinn, Michael Shannon and  Lance Reddick. There are some premier actors in this list. It was Josh Brolin’s baby and he brought in the entire cast. This was a film he was passionate about.

In the end, Jonah Hex was an “82 minute huh?”  I found myself asking what was going on nearly every scene. I wondered how much was edited out and how much the studio must have interfered with the film because there was nothing sensical in front of me. The scenes in this film are incoherent. Jonah is supposed to be able to talk to dead people. So, naturally he wakes up a dead tortured corpse to pester him about the whereabouts of drunken Malkovich. This is the only time he talks to a dead person.

Also, in one scene Will Arnett is a serious union general….

Then, he is on a boat that gets leveled by a cannon….You are still wondering why he was in the movie well after he is Cannon fodder.

Also, it makes you fear for John Malkovich’s life. I have never seen a more bloated human in my life.

If you look at the poster  and picture above you will notice that Brolin, Fox and Fassbender all have full body pics. However, you only vaguely see Malkovich’s head.

The same pattern is featured on the individual posters.

They can’t even put his entire head in the poster. In the poster on the top  of the review they put hair over his face. Thus, maybe John knew something that nobody else knew so he drank away every cent he made on the film.

After leaving the theater I was still scratching my head in amazement. What kind of parallel universe allowed this film to happen? What did the executives think after watching ? In a world of sensical movies it was a breath of fresh air to see a film that dared to make zero sense. The greatest thing is that it is based on a DC Comic. A comic that could have spelled out the entire film and they chose not to follow it. This movie makes Sucker Punch’s plot seem coherent.