Lowering my Standards

So I watched Jonah Hex.  I've never read the comic so I have to assume that the films interpretation of the character is correct: His family was killed and he was scarred and left to die so he gained the power to talk to the dead and then because he didn't like the scar he already had, he double-scarred himself with a red-hot axe.

Jonah Hex stars a bunch of people playing themselves: Josh Brolin plays a guy in a western; John Malkovich an evil version of Falcor and Megan Fox plays a whore.

The film is eighty minutes long and contains at least 8 minutes of flashbacks to remind you what has happened.  So easily ten percent of this movie is repeats of the movie.  This is the power of movies: To make something so dull that you need to be reminded of what you saw right after you saw it.

In a nutshell:  Evil Falcor kills Jonah's family because Jonah realized war is bad and Evil Falcor thinks war is good.  Then Evil Falcor dies.  So Jonah becomes a bounty hunter.  Then Evil Falcor is alive again and planning to ruin Americas centennial.  So Jonah has to stop him and his super weapon.  The super weapon is a boat with a flame thrower on the back and a gatling gun which shoots sci-fi cannonballs in the front.  Over the course of the film we discover that Jonah can torture dead people, has a crow living inside of him (The crow is removed through the power of mud), and that snake people make worthy pit fighters.  Jonah Hex wins (Spoiler!) and invents the tradition of fireworks on the 4th of July.

Jonah Hex smacks of cowardice.  The original writers, Neveldine/ Taylor, are probably the most gifted writers (And exciting directors) working in Hollywood and while you can see the occasional moments of sheer insanity and contempt to humanity and/or logic, their script was re-written & tampered with to the point of weak-minded comprehension (Because I promise you friend that if they had had their way, nothing would have made sense.) and what's left is a PG13 mess.  Thanks to Jonah Hex I've realized PG13 is less a rating and more a warning that what you're about to see has been rendered offensively inoffensively offensive in the hope of losing less money.

Even Mastodon, one of the most exciting post-metal bands of the new century are rendered sterile and impotent in supplying the films so called soundtrack.

This movie is a missed opportunity in every way possible.  Here's the trailer which, if it were a person would be the asshole in high school who beat you up and then became your boss: