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Watch Jonah Hex

Whipping via its spaghetti Western/post-Civil War swampland ghost story in just 83 minutes, Jonah Hex is lean, mean and brimming with wicked steampunk weaponry. While Josh Brolin channels Clint Eastwood's Guy Without any Name successfully enough in his gruff incarnation on the comic book antihero, the movie's arsenal of Gatling guns, cannons and crossbows outshines its human stars. Jonah Hex, rated PG-13 and opening Friday, uses writer John Albano and illustrator Tony DeZuniga's DC Comics series as being a foundation to get a 19th-century revenge saga. Tortured during the Civil War by his sadistic Confederate commander Quentin Turnbull (played by John Malkovich), Jonah Hex gains a supernatural connection while using the dead right after being rescued by Indians. Eleven many years later, the U.S. Army dispatches Hex, now a scar-faced bounty hunter, to track down Turnbull prior to the villain blows up Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July.

Feisty prostitute Lilah, played by Megan Fox, offers brief diversion on the action. A sensual thigh may be the 1st point to appear through Lilah's first scene, which telegraphs the jaded, perpetually tight-bodiced character's eye candy function through the rest in the film. A lot more disappointing is John Malkovich as the evil Turnbull. 1 of filmdom's finest serial portrayers of psychopathic nutballs (Within the Line of Fire, Burn Following Reading), Malkovich appears the part in his wild wig. Everything functions when Turnbull coolly sips lemonade as his cannons destroy a bucolic little town, but with the most component, the Oscar-nominated character actor plays his weirdly accented villainy with so much distance that the love-to-hate-him aspect goes missing in action. Animator-turned-director Jimmy Hayward, working with cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen (Desired), nicely frames wide-screen vistas as if they had popped out on the comic book pane with silhouetted man-on-horseback sequences, brooding skies, moonlit graveyards and hypersaturated dream sequences. A thunderous soundtrack from Marco Beltrami (Hellboy) and heavy metal band Mastodon sells the story's fire and brimstone mood at the expense of dynamic nuance.

And while Oscar-nominated Brolin (Milk, No Country for Old Guys) provides a consistent portrait of the violent, profoundly unhappy man who's haunted by his past, there's only so very much he and his weird weapons can do to freshen up the familiar fight scenes or Neveldine & Taylor's relentlessly on-the-nose dialogue. Jonah Hex scores sporadically as being a lurid sensory assault but falls short of plumbing the soul of its gnarly title character. I have no idea what occurred behind the scenes of Jonah Hex, beyond the broad strokes that have been reported. But I do know that the final product is a shell of the film, a barely functioning picture that can make it to feature length only via repeated scenes and random thematic detours. At just 73 minutes long not having end credits, it is the shortest live-action film I have ever seen in a theater. Heck, a lot of of Warner Bros' direct-to-DVD DC Comics animated features are longer. Like past films that were heavily-tinkered to no avail in post-production, there is just enough of a kernel of substance and thought to make one mourn the final cut. The failure of Jonah Hex is not a cause for gloating or mockery. It is a tragedy.

A token amount of plot -- the Civil War is over, and America is around the precipice of celebrating 100 years of nationhood. However, the embittered Confederate officer Quinten Turnbell (John Malkovich) has plans to launch a horrifying terrorist attack on our nation's centennial, in the hopes that the people will turn against a government that failed to protect them from mass murder. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) has no choice but to track down Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), the nomad bounty hunter who once served under Turnbell. Long ago, at the close in the war, Turnbell blamed Hex with the death of his son and took bloody revenge, killing Hex's family and scarring him for life. Can Hex track down his hated enemy and settle a score before Turnbell unleashes Hell on American soil?

There is a framework to get a solid western here, and one wonders what became of the original screenplay by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank, Gamer).<br> The film is briefly successful at establishing tone, with Hex's comedic violence (including a really Crank-like moment when Hex shoots an attacker who falls correct back into the coffin where he was hiding) contrasted by Turnbell's grisly rampage. PG-13 aside, this is a startlingly violent film, with innocent civilians being massacred wholesale all through. Whether or not Neveldine and Taylor intended Malkovich's homegrown terrorist being a parable to Timothy McVeigh or our worst fears about the most fringe members from the Tea Party movement (a first-act attack involves domestic suicide bombers), the film's surprising 'what-if?' topicality gives it far more weight than it probably deserves. At face value, the core arc of the film involves bitter anti-government loner Jonah Hex confronting an extremist version of himself, someone who's anti-government outrage has allowed him to justify the slaughter of innocents. The 1 almost-great scene in the film has Hex applying his hastily-explained ability to talk to the dead to converse with Turnbell's dead son, Hex's best friend who he killed in order to stop Turnbell from committing war crimes. For better or worse, the film never forgets Hex's and Turnbell's connection to each other.

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