Review of Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex (2010)
6/10
Pretty bad, but not as bad as some are saying.
25 June 2010
First, I want to mention some of the good stuff. Josh Brolin is excellent as Hex, perfect casting, great job by Brolin, thoroughly enjoyable to watch. John Malkovich was very good in a role that could have easily been too over the top to be taken seriously. Fassbender was genuinely creepy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was great, and Megan Fox looks gorgeous and her acting is not that bad. Combine that with an amazing soundtrack by Mastodon, (and a surprise cameo by Brent Hinds) I have to say I enjoyed the movie. The negatives: "The Weapon" - a weird, quasi-science, completely unexplained "nation-killer" invented by Eli Whitney... WTF? Stupid. While on the subject, why does the world have to be at stake? A simple revenge tale would have sufficed. Aidan Quinn was awful, but it probably wasn't his fault, unless he wrote his own lines. Why tell Hex's backstory with a couple of minutes of poorly animated crap with a voice-over when they could've filmed Hex's origin sequence and made it a much better movie? No idea, but I can't explain many of the choices that were made on this movie. Why was it only 80 minutes long? Who thought that was a good idea? Who cast Will Arnett in a straight role? I kept waiting for him to do something funny. To sum it up, there was some really good work done on this movie, but there were too many terrible decisions made that left it a disjointed mess in spite of its potential. As a life-long Jonah Hex fan, I was happy to see him captured so perfectly by Brolin, but disappointed as hell that the studio screwed up the movie so badly, and ruined any chance of this becoming a successful franchise.
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