Jonah Hex

Six years after Batman Begins proved a serious-minded DC adaptation could work, Warner Bros. handed a very different kind of comic book property to a first-time live-action director. Jonah Hex arrived on June 18, 2010, with Josh Brolin under a slab of prosthetic scar tissue, John Malkovich chewing frontier scenery, and a running time of 81 minutes that told you almost everything about the trouble behind the camera.

The character had been around since 1972, when writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga introduced him in DC's All-Star Western #10. A disfigured Confederate cavalryman turned bounty hunter, Hex was a Western antihero with a horror-comic streak, and the film leaned hard into the supernatural: touch a corpse, and Hex can briefly bring it back to answer questions. That gimmick gave the movie its most distinctive scenes and, critics agreed, far too little of its screen time.

Jimmy Hayward, who had directed the animated Horton Hears a Who!, made his live-action debut here from a script by Crank duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The cast looked formidable on paper: Megan Fox as the saloon woman Leila, Michael Fassbender as the knife-wielding henchman Burke, Aidan Quinn as Ulysses S. Grant, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a small role as Turnbull's doomed son. It did not save the picture. Against a $47 million budget, Jonah Hex scraped together roughly $10.5 million worldwide, one of 2010's most conspicuous flops. [edit]

The war is nearly over when Jonah Hex disobeys an order. A Confederate cavalry officer serving under his commanding officer and old friend Quentin Turnbull, Hex refuses to take part in the slaughter of a Union garrison that has already surrendered. In the confusion that follows, Turnbull's son Jeb is killed. Turnbull holds Hex responsible, and his retaliation is methodical and intimate: he forces Hex to watch as his family's farm burns with his wife and young son trapped inside, then brands Hex's face with a red-hot tomahawk and leaves him to die.

Hex does not die. Something worse happens. He wakes with half his face destroyed and a strange, unwelcome connection to the other side. By touching a corpse, he can briefly pull it back from death long enough to ask it questions. It is a gift that makes him a terrifyingly effective bounty hunter and a man most people cross the street to avoid. He drinks hard, keeps his hat low, and takes work where he can find it across the Reconstruction-era frontier.

Then the government comes calling. Hex is hauled to Washington and brought before President Ulysses S. Grant, who has a problem he cannot solve with the Army. Turnbull, long presumed dead, is alive and has stolen a weapon built during the war but never used: a device designed to kill on a scale no battlefield had seen. He intends to fire it at the capital during the nation's centennial celebrations and throw the fragile, reunified country back into chaos. Grant offers Hex a full pardon and his freedom if he hunts Turnbull down. Hex has his own reasons to say yes.

He is paired with Lieutenant Grass, the Army officer assigned to keep an eye on him, and crosses paths with Leila, a saloon woman whose connection to Hex runs deeper than either of them says out loud. Turnbull travels with a devoted crew, including Burke, an Irish henchman who favors knives and does not flinch, and Lusk, a hulking enforcer covered in tattoos. As Hex follows the trail, his ability to question the dead lets him reconstruct pieces of Turnbull's plan that the living are determined to keep hidden. Flashbacks keep returning to the massacre, the fire, and the brand, filling in the betrayal that set everything in motion.

The shape of the story is a revenge duel with a ticking clock bolted to it. Hex wants the man who destroyed his family. Grant wants the weapon stopped before it reaches Washington. Turnbull wants to finish what the war started. The film moves between muddy frontier towns and Turnbull's fortified operation, blending Western standoffs with comic-book hardware and a hero who is halfway to being a ghost himself. Hex closes in, the countdown tightens, and the two men who once rode together move toward the confrontation the whole movie has been promising.[edit]