Jonah Hex in Wild Wild West

Did you see the Jonah Hex movie? Neither did I.
Oh wait, I did. I watched it as a free download on my Shaw on Demand cable box deal. It’s so good, they’re giving it away for free, and I was still undecided about watching it. If you don’t know, (and chances are you don’t): Jonah Hex is one of the least recognizable DC comic book characters. He’s not the oddest choice for a DC character to make it to the silver screen (Constantine, Steel, etc.), and cost-wise it’s easier to make a cowboy western movie that a big budget super hero flick. Only, someone forgot this was supposed to be a movie about the ol’ West.
If you’ve played Red Dead Redemption, you’d know that cowboys are making a comeback as of late. That seems to happen with fictional franchises (think pirates, vampires, etc.). They’ll go away for decades then come back in a huge way.
On the outside, Jonah Hex seems like a standard western about a bounty hunter with a fucked up face, but even if you watch the trailer you’ll see a lot more stuff blowing up than has any right to be.

Apparently, people in the ol’ West built their houses out of dynamite. Then there’s a scene where Jonah has a twin Gatling guns strapped to the sides of a horse, which is pretty awesome, but also pretty retarded. Wouldn’t that kind of weapon overload a horse, which if you watch the full scene is also pulling three dead bodies behind in “fag drag” style? Plus, if I was a horse, I’d be pretty freaked out by having not one, but two giant guns firing a hundred bullets a minute past my shoulders like I’m War Machine in Iron Man. This horse is a stone cold professional, though, and not only does he go with it, he fucking strafes his targets in what can only be describes as,  “overkill.” If the whole movie was about a horse with Gatling guns bringing law and order to the ol’ West, then this would have made a far superior movie. Sadly, this wasn’t the case.
A lot of shit in this movie makes no sense in any capacity. Plus the opening scenes have shitty comic-book animation. Like every movie involving someone shooting someone else, it’s driven by a revenge plot. Jonah has his family barbequed, so he’s out to get the people responsible. Only, at the end of the opening sequence, it tells us in narration that the guy Jonah’s after died in a fire. So… the movie’s over, right? WRONG! Megan Fox hasn’t even showed up yet, so we’ve got to kill the next hour or so somehow. Tunrbull, the bad guy, who’s played by the slumming actor, John Malkovich, comes back to life. How? I don’t know. I got up to make popcorn. He might be a vampire, or zombie, or a pirate ghost, I don’t know, but the movie has a supernatural element to it that really doesn’t belong. There’s a whole scene where Jonah digs up a grave and talks to an old friend who’s also some kind of zombie-thing. Up until that point, things were going somewhat normally, save for the Gatling gun horse, then it turns all Buffy.
Why did the movie need vampires/zombies/Irish stereotypes who primarily use guns? Who the fuck knows. That’s not even the worst element. The worst is: this movie is a sequel/remake of Wild Wild West.

Yes, that Wild Wild West.
Now, it’s not literally related to Wild Wild West, but it has all the same elements. You’ll understand what I mean when Turnbull pulls out the Steampunk WMD. You know the giant steam-driven robo-spider in Wild Wild West? This movie has something less ridiculous, but still ridiculous. It involves glowing balls. It even has the same U.S. President trying not to be assassinated by said weapon by employing a person of questionable professionalism instead of using his vast army. Westerns, by definition, should not be set on the Eastern Seaboard near Washington D.C..
Speaking of glowing: Megan Fox. You know how in old movies they’d always white-wash the starlet with that weird glowing-effect? They’d use a special lens to make the actress more blurry, and hence: less fugly. They do that to Megan with digital touch-ups, which is confusing. She’s not the decaying corpse of Elizabeth Taylor: she’s a twenty-something actress wearing out the last fifteen minutes of her fame in a corset. Megan plays a whore (insert joke here), who’s fucking the shit out of Jonah off-camera. Remember: Jonah lost his wife in a fire, and we’re supposed to sympathize with him and his pain. He drowns his pain in Megan Fox’s cooch, though, so… yeah…. it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for him. In fact, you kind of want to punch him in the good side of his face.
There’s more weird shit going on too: like a crow jumps out of Jonah’s mouth at one point with constant flash-backs to his family getting torched, and a Snake Man pit fighter who drools acid. Then there’s a scene where Jonah blows up a whole house with a gun. Then there’s a scene stolen from Van Helsing where Jonah gets a Steampunk crossbow that shoots exploding arrow-missile like he’s Rambo. Then the final fight scene happens on two levels. Jonah fights his foe in reality (Malkovich doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d take that much effort to put down, but Jonah has a hell of a time), and in a dream sequence, and it cuts back and forth. I don’t know if this is supposed to be clever and artsy, but it’s not.
Really, this movie fucks up. All it had to do was show Jonah being a bounty hunting cowboy, but you can’t edit this movie enough to bring it back to that purist level. Jonah Hex as a comic book has about zero fans, so it doesn’t matter if it pisses them off, but instead it chose to piss everyone off. It had a okay cast too, giving terrible performances. The make-up job they did on Jonah’s signature face was poorly done. Pretty much everything was wrong. It’s like if someone wanted to rape an entire movie genres non-satirically.

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