Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)To begin, please understand two things about me:
1: I Love Westerns.
2: I`ve been a fan of the character 'Jonah Hex' for over 30 years.
In the comics, Jonah Hex caught my interest because of the gritty, hard-edged stories that featured a tough ex-Confederate soldier turned hard-case Bounty Hunter roaming the old West. I won`t belabor the details, but if you want a good idea of the tone of Jonah Hex; most fans liken Clint Eastwood`s "The Outlaw Josie Wales" to practically be a Jonah Hex movie. Jonah Hex would indeed ask the immortal question "You Gonna Pull Those Pistols, Or Whistle Dixie?"
The movie "Jonah Hex", while somewhat capturing the charaacter`s 'Attitude', unfortunately sees fit to muck it up with supernatural underpinnings and the sort of gimmickry that James West would laugh at ( ...I mean...c`mon...twin Gatling Guns mounted on a saddle? ...a gun that shoots lit sticks of dynamite ?? )
Jonah Hex --the character -- was NEVER about gadgets and gimmicks, or Bringing The Dead Back To Life for Q&A sessions.
It`s painfully obvious that the makers of this movie were too timid to risk a straight, hard-edged WESTERN, so they basically threw in everything they could think of to please a teen-age audience ...and created A MESS.
Now, I do enjoy so-called 'Steampunk' --The afformentioned 'The Wild Wild West' tv series is a good example--but the storyline of Jonah Hex The Character just was never about Steampunk.
Neither does the character require supernatural powers to be interesting.
This film has been compared to Sonnenfeld`s 1999 "Wild Wild West", which managed to take a successful tv series and ruin virtually every aspect that made it a hit. It`s a common trend in Hollywood: "Let`s make a movie of a fan-favorite tv series and change things"....The changes of course are "To make it more appealing to a broader audience" ... So the logic is that you want to cash in on a pop classic and yet alter it so that the very people who enjoyed it enough to make it a pop classic will be disgusted ?
Hey--Hollywood knows best what people will like...right?
The real tragedy here is that, like James West; Jonah Hex has now been ruined for The Big Screen and likely will never get another shot at that venue.
Of course, film-makers in Hollywood these days have long since lost all faith in the Western genre. It`s too bad...Great characters create fans by being appealing, by being...great. The movie "Jonah Hex" was a twisted take on a great character; twisted to suit the perceived tastes of teenagers who supposedly would not like a solid Western character.
Well....I was a teenager when I became a Jonah Hex fan.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Jonah Hex (2010)
Out of the pages of the legendary comics and graphic novels steps Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), a scarred drifter and bounty hunter of last resort who can track anyone... and anything. Having survived death, Jonah's violent history is steeped in myth and legend and has left him with one foot in the natural world and one on the "other side." His one human connection is with Lilah (Megan Fox), whose life in a brothel has left her with scars of her own. But Jonah's past catches up with him when the U.S. military makes him an offer he can't refuse: to wipe out the warrants on his head, he must hunt and stop dangerous terrorist Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). But Turnbull, now gathering an army and preparing to unleash Hell, is also Jonah's oldest enemy and will stop at nothing until Jonah is dead.
