Script2Screen

Rating:

“Jonah Hex”, penned by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, is a bland mess of a script.

The Good:

The story starts out promising enough. Jonah Hex is a scarred bounty hunter and ex-Confederate cavalryman. He doesn’t seem very particular about who he has to kill, so long as he gets paid. The very first scene tells us what happens when a client decides not to pay. It’s a scene designed to show just how dangerous the character is as Hex quickly adds to his body count. Unfortunately, it’s the only mildly interesting action in the screenplay.

Shortly after, Hex is hired by the U.S. Army to track down Quentin Turnbull, a former plantation owner trying to raise an army to refight the Civil War. Coincidentally, Hex has unfinished business with Turnbull, which has him anxious for revenge. This is where the script becomes a briefly fun and crazy adventure. It turns into a supernatural journey with an episodic nature.

Similar to television series such as “The Fugitive” or “Kung Fu”, Hex’s search for Turnbull takes him to various locations where he is put into unrelated danger or must help the defenseless. At one point, Hex must solve a mystery involving kidnapped girls and zombies in order to acquire the information he needs. Unfortunately, these side missions don’t last long and soon reverts to the less interesting quest for vengeance. Disappointingly, trailers lead me to believe the zombies didn’t even make the finished film. If you’ve seen the trailers, you can tell this movie was always going to be an insane, unrealistic adventure. They should’ve gone all out and played up the supernatural as much as possible.

The Bad:

Aside from the opening sequence, the action reads as generic western fare without style or heart. Turnbull’s introductory scene features an attack on a military supply train, but is over so fast that there is no time to get excited about the action. The troops aboard the train don’t even get to fire a shot.

More important action moments are similarly underwhelming. In Hex’s final fight against Burke (Turnbull’s psychopathic right-hand man), the writers describe only enough of the fight to let readers know one took place. It ends off-screen (or off-page). Hex predictably wins, but your guess is as good as mine when it comes to how he won.

The climactic battle with Turnbull is a fairly one-sided fight. Hex gets shot, but it doesn’t slow him any. He quickly grabs Turnbull’s cane and proceeds to bludgeon the man to death.

The Ugly:

The screenplay doesn’t do enough to make the reader care about Jonah Hex. The writers use a voice-over technique to build the legend of Jonah Hex, which involves various competing explanations for his scar. Instead of helping develop a sense of mystery, all these explanations actually soften the real tragedy behind the scar. By the time Hex’s backstory is told, we’ve heard so many stories that the real one becomes just another one to throw on the pile.

Furthermore, the writers seem to desperately want audiences to think Hex is a badass. Unfortunately, the first scene is the only part where he does anything original enough to deserve praise. The rest of the screenplay has him threatening or killing the occassional person who insults him, but there’s nothing exceptionally cool about any of it. It’s as if we’re simply supposed to think he is awesome because all the voice-over stories tells us how dangerous he is, which is pretty lazy writing.

Finally, Turnbull’s scripted plan doesn’t make any sense. He’s gathering a new Confederate army. Okay, that’s a simple enough scheme. Except… he’s not really planning to use this army. He only has it to show politicians he can raise one, which will intimate them into bowing to him as the secret puppetmaster in Washington. However, he explicitly tells the politicians’ representative that he will never actually march on Washington. Anyone seeing a problem with this? Even if the representative doesn’t tell the politicians Turnbull is bluffing, how long is this army going to sit around before they realize Turnbull isn’t giving them the revenge he promised? And what’s to stop someone else from stepping up to lead it? I’ve heard better plots in Bond films, and that includes the ones where the villain wants to kill the Earth’s population so he can rule over the remaining wastelands.

Based on the screenplay, I suggest you not waste your time on this film, which opened today.