One of the worst crimes a film can commit is to be so unforgivingly boring and uninteresting. It is this crime that the film Jonah Hex commits constantly during its 81 minute running time. Although I must say this in its defense, it's not as painfully bad as Old Dogs was.
Jonah Hex is the story of an ex-confederate soldier named Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) who, when he disobeys the orders of his corrupt commanding officer; Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich); actidentally causes the death of Quentin's son. Seeking vengence, Quentin ties Jonah to a makeshift cross and forces him to watch as he burns down his house with his family inside, afterwards burning his initials into Jonah's face. Long story short, Jonah almost dies but is rescued by a bunch of indians and comes back with the power to talk to the dead. Several years later, Quentin creates a doomsday weapon which will tear apart the United States and the only person who can stop him is Jonah Hex, who has since found work as a bounty hunter.
There are several weak elements in Jonah Hex. The acting is done with a shrug of "I could care less" (every actor in the film does this), the story is thrown together hurredly, the editing is super-choppy, and even the action sequences had me yawning.
Part of the problem is that we, the audience, are given literally NO REASON to care about the proceedings. Jonah is given a good amount of backstory but it's all fairly standard material (to be fair though, the film is based off a DC comic), guy is forced to watch death of family and seeks revenge against villain who did it. Josh Brolin's acting doesn't help things either. He speaks in a barely audible mumble and has a very monotone emotionless delivery to almost every single one of his lines (the prosthetic that covers half of his face doesn't help things since it basically paralyzes half of his face ). He seems like he isn't enjoying his role here one little bit. The other much touted star of the film; Megan Fox; is given pretty much nill to do here except to stand around and look hot, although lets be honest with ourselves, the chick can't act worth squat so let's consider this a blessing. The only memorable scene she has is when she is in a corset where her breasts are just begging to be set free. Damn PG-13 rating.
The main doomsday weapon seems thrown together with no thought given to it at all. It's basically 5 cannons strapped onto a wheel. Oooh, threatening, BUT WAIT they first shoot out cannonballs and then shoot out a small, orange, glowing ball that makes everything explode....doesn't that sound cool???? No???? I thought so too. Maybe if they took a good few minutes to explain how the thing works it would seem more threatening. Nope! Like everything else in the film they just slap it onto the screen and expect us to care because it's a movie.
Is there any character development??? Little to none. Are the action scenes exciting???? Nope, as I already said I actually outright YAWNED during some of them!! Just about the only good parts of the film are some of the one-liners and sight gags (Jonah shoots a bad guy back into the coffin he hopped out of) and the scenes where Jonah gets to interact with the dead, but there's only three of those throughout the film. For a film that's main hook is a guy that can talk to dead guy's you'd think they'd build on that alot more than they actually do.
Pretty much the filmmakers took us, the audience, for granted. They took the typical rich kid attitude toward the creation of this film: "You should care about this because we said so." Well, they didn't say so. They took a bunch of tired western cliches that they didn't know how to use properly, an uninteresting story, and some pretty dull characters and tried to spice the whole thing up with an interesting trait that they don't even bother to blink at and some uninspired action scenes. Overall, if the filmmakers didn't care when they made this garbage then why should we care about it when we watch it? It's not a terrible film (it is bad though), it's just boring.
1/5 Stars SOME OLE BULLSHIT
No comments:
Post a Comment