Review: Jonah Hex (15) (From The Bolton News)

Review: Jonah Hex (15)

4:46pm Friday 3rd September 2010 in Reviews

81 mins) Action. Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Michael Shannon, Wes Bentley, Aidan Quinn. Director: Jimmy Hayward.

Another week, another comic book adaptation. With Hollywood feeling the economic gloom along with the rest of us, proven hits such as graphic novels seem to promise ripe pickings for success-hungry producers.

But they all need a USP.

Unlike the recent run of geeky, futuristic caped crusaders, Jonah Hex is an anti-hero: A scarred bounty hunter in the Wild West.

A former Confederate soldier in the Civil War, his family was killed by Colonel Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) and his face branded with hot metal.

He still bears the emotional and physical scars and rides around the country using his supernatural powers of talking to dead people to help him catch villains - which sates his thirst for revenge.

When Turnbull starts plotting to overthrow the union, Hex (Josh Brolin) is the only man who can stop him.

As a rock riff fades to old country guitar, Hex begins the film with a voiceover: “War and me took to each other really well, felt like it had meaning... Doing what you felt was right, but it wasn’t.”

It’s ironic these words are voiced by the actor who also played George Bush in W.

In flashback, we see Turnbull string Hex up on a cross outside his burning family home, before branding him. A comic strip montage brings us up to the present: Hex riding into town dragging three dead men behind him.

Cue a slick Western shoot-out, as Hex kills the double-crossing Sheriff and his men, before riding off with a swish of his worn military cloak.

Turnbull, presumed dead but very much alive, begins his dastardly plan by hijacking a train carrying Union soldiers and stealing a ‘superweapon’ - which he’ll use to wipe out Washington.

When President Grant (Aidan Quinn) learns of the “terrorista”, he declares: “The fate of our nation rests on Jonah Hex’s shoulders”.

Hex, meanwhile, is partaking of some rye, which mostly drains through the hole in his disfigured face, before paying a visit to his lady friend Lilah (Megan Fox) - a New Orleans prostitute who counts his bullet holes as foreplay.

Fox is in characteristic feisty sidekick territory here, but apart from the final slow-motion shoot-out on Turnbull’s boat, she sees very little action - and is really only there for her corset-clad sex appeal.

Michael Fassbender is deliciously manic as Turnbull’s tattooed Irish right-hand man Burke, and Brolin embodies the death-defying Hex to perfection.