Starring: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Aidan Quinn

Director: Jimmy Hayward
Released: 2010

Mood: If you’ve been riddled with self-loathing lately and need a way to punish yourself from the couch.

I’m back from a Western movie hiatus, with my passion refuelled AND a renewed urge to share my opinions with strangers. This comeback demanded a movie that was either guaranteed to be stellar, or to be a total turd. And there’s one movie that I knew would definitely be a giant, flaming turdburger: Jonah Hex.

Warning: profanity ahead. A shitload of it.

I wasn’t basing my assumption on this atrocity’s ratings, although I could have. Jonah Hex has amassed:

• A 12% rating on Rotten Tomatoes
• A 4.7/10 on IMDb
• A 33% on both Metacritic and TV Guide
• A rare ‘F’ on AV Club
• 2 Golden Raspberry nominations for Megan Fox

I also wasn’t basing it on the fact that Jonah Hex only made $10M on a $47M budget. Or that its LEAD F*CKING ACTOR, Josh Brolin, initially hated the script and told Variety, “I won’t ever stop shitting on ‘Jonah Hex‘ because it was a shitty f*cking movie!” Megan Fox also hated the script and, later, the film.

Nah, my reason for assuming the worst was simply that I’m fiercely loyal to the REAL Jonah Hex and to DC Comics, and knew they would f*ck it up. To quote Iron Man – albeit in a different role, but I want to use a Marvel actor to slap DC upside its f*cking head – this movie can “suck my unit.”

Jonah Hex as a character is a lot like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. He’s a squinty, gravelly-voiced, grunting antihero who has no qualms about killing, and possesses just one redeeming quality: he will fight to the death to defend or avenge the innocent.

Movie-Hex’s (Josh Brolin) backstory is that he’s an ex-Confederate soldier who deserted when he was asked to burn down a hospital. This caused his best friend, Jeb (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, uncredited), to pull a gun on him, so Hex shot and killed him. Jeb’s father, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), hunts Hex down and forces him to watch as his family is killed a la The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Fast forward a bit. President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) figures out that Turnbull is planning on building a 20th century-style weapon to attack the US capital on the Fourth of July. Grant hires Hex to stop Turnbull.

Movie-Hex has a quasi-girlfriend, a brothel worker named Lilah/Tallulah (Megan Fox). He can also reanimate and communicate with the dead, and has a crapload of high-powered gadgets that turn the story from a casually Weird Western into some kind of Wild Wild West meets Michael Bay looking bullshit.

Movie-Hex has ties to the Crow people and they heal him when he’s shot, but you never get to know anything else about that relationship. Meanwhile Turnbull and his posse of angry Southern rebels have a giant weapon, an ironclad warship, and a lust to take down the leftist government by storming the capital.

Now that sounds familiar.

Here are all of the ways the writers of the Jonah Hex movie f*cked up Hex’s existing story for no good reason. Let this bullet list and nerd rant serve to eviscerate a shitty movie, but also to uplift the amazing comics:

• 95% of the plot is new material, which is deeply, unforgivably insulting to the decades of great AUTHENTIC story that’s available in the comics and would have made for an epic movie script
• In the All-Star Western comics Hex is kicking around 1880s Gotham, getting into mischief with relatives of popular Batman characters – how didn’t anybody see the massive DC universe-building potential to use that story?!
• As a youth Hex was sold to an Apache tribe by his alcoholic father, and worked as a slave until an act of bravery made him a favourite of the chief; he was then betrayed by the chief’s son and abandoned by the tribe – this would have added much-needed depth to movie-Hex
• Hex joined the the Confederate army but later deserted because he couldn’t bring himself to defend slavery, and he frequently fought for Black and Native people; the movie writers made a conscious choice to omit all of this side of his character
• When Hex deserted he immediately surrendered to a Union camp, but clay on his boots gave up the location of his unit; they were captured, Hex tried to free them, and the tunnels he dug led them into a trap where they were all gunned down, leaving Hex with lifelong guilt – again, a WAY richer piece of backstory than simply shooting his friend over disobeying his father’s orders
• Quentin Turnbull is part of Hex’s origin story and turns up occasionally throughout his adventures, but Hex’s facial disfigurement came from the Apache chief – another painful memory – and comic-Turnbull’s only focus is on taking down Hex through classic Western tactics like framing or murder
• Hex has many encounters with supernatural beings, but has NO special powers beyond being an expert marksman while blind in one eye; he’s physically strong, and an expert at hand-fighting and tracking, due to lifelong training and experience
• Hex never f*cked with gadgets unless he was in another time and/or had no choice; he did all of his fighting with a pistol, a hatchet, or his fists
• There IS a Ulysses S. Grant story in the comics, but it has nothing in common with this ridiculous mess
• Tallulah is a badass with a rich backstory involving a gang sexual assault that left her disfigured and constantly ridiculed, which drove her to become a violent bounty hunter with skills on par with Hex; the heavily rewritten and under-dressed character was grossly disappointing

Superhero movies are supposed to bring the comics to life – ideally with a reverence for the source material AND the potential for sequels. But pretty much the only thing Jonah Hex’s director and writers took from the glorious DC comics was the names.

I’m so mad at the absolute NERVE of these people, doing zero research and thinking they know better than legendary Hex comic writers Michael Fleisher, John Albano, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Justin Gray.

Jonah Hex is riddled with bad dialogue, which makes it harder to tell a poor performance from an actor suffering from the script. But here’s my hot take:

• Josh Brolin really gives it his all, against the odds
• Megan Fox makes Lilah/Tallulah vapid and one-note, devoid of chemistry with anyone
• John Malkovich does a solid job with Turnbull
• Aidan Quinn is earnest but utterly wasted in this movie
• Michael Fassbender is a total standout, apparently referencing The Riddler and A Clockwork Orange

Brolin has done some heavily layered work over the years, from True Grit to Outer Range, and it’s shocking that True Grit came out in the same year as Jonah Hex. For whatever reason, Brolin’s frustrations with the inexperienced director or the dumpster-fire script or that nothing about the movie aligning with his vision – he feels miscast. Hex needed someone darker, possibly more wiry, and definitely super twisted. Like Christian Bale, Guy Pearce in his Proposition era, Ethan Hawke, Tim Blake Nelson, Benicio Del Toro, or Garret Dillahunt.

And Lilah/Tallulah should have been played by someone closer in age to Hex, and able to deliver a hard edge and get a little ugly. Like Tia Carrere, Angelina Jolie, Krysten Ritter, Charlize Theron, Carrie-Anne Moss, or Rosario Dawson.

The Jonah Hex movie script seems to have passed through many hands and many rewrites, and apparently everyone involved just added more WRONG. I’m sure the original versions that Brolin and Fox detested were even worse, but by softening the edges and amping up the special effects, and trying to add something for everyone they lost any sense of story.

Hex didn’t need fake-ass explosions and preposterous weapons – a gatling gun strapped to a horse, are you kidding me? Have the writers ever MET a horse?

The original comics came out in the ‘70s, inspired by the Dollars trilogy and the new antihero, counterculture Western vibe. The ‘90s version of Hex was further injected with a bit of a jaded, alcoholic GenX-ness. Both incarnations are delicious reading for anyone who appreciates the DC tone. The movie has none of that.

Jonah Hex fails as a Western, it fails as a comic book movie, and it failed me personally on every level.