Scarred bad-ass Jonah Hex discovers that the villainous Quentin Turnbull (delivered with a side of ham by John Malkovich) who forced him to watch the immolation of his family and then branded his face is still alive and, now armed with a über weapon (designed by Eli Whitney no less), is planning on destroying the United States on the eve of its centennial. The film is similar to, and only slightly better than, Barry Sonnenfeld's awful 'Wild Wild West' (1999) revisioning. The filmmakers lacked faith in their source material (a DC comic series), so the hyper-skilled but otherwise mundane gun-fighter can now speak to the dead and is able to walk away after being shot in the chest at close range. These seemingly supernatural abilities are convenient to advance the slender plot but, other than a suggestion that some kind of indigenous magic is involved (Crow Indians initially saved his life, hence an over-done crow motif), are never really elaborated on or explained. Brolin is fine as yet another gravelly-voiced anti-hero, Turnbull's minions are the usual blood-thirsty semi-competants, but most of the 'good' secondary characters are throw-aways appealing to current aesthetics, including an ass-kicking hooker (Megan Fox) and a Black armourer (Lance Reddick, the focus of an awkward exchange necessitated (I suspect) by the desire to maintain Hex's hero-status despite being an ex-confederate soldier without offending sensitive millennials). The action sequences are technically well-done but are typical of CGI-enhanced shoot-em-ups: over-the-top gunfights and lots of weapons that look cool but that don't really make sense. Occasionally the scenes go very dark suggesting that images that didn't look as good as hoped are being obscured and the big reveal of Turnbull's super-weapon is a bit of a disappointment. Even as a second-string comic-book adaptation, the film is substandard and watchable only as a no-brainer time-waster.
Review of Jonah Hex
