REVIEW: Don't Hate Jonah Hex For Being Leisurely

There's something to be said for having low expectations, especially when it comes to summer movies. The pictures we expect to be great, if only because they've been sold and hyped to the heavens (a la Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood), so often disappoint us. The way movies are made and marketed these days, junky, throwaway fun is in short supply: With some big releases costing $200 million or more, the studios just can't afford it. That's why a picture like Jonah Hex -- hardly a work of genius but wholly serviceable as a bit of summer silliness -- feels completely suitable, in an old-fashioned way, for a hot summer weekend. When the stakes are low and the AC is on high, why not make a date with a maimed but righteous post-Civil War-era bounty hunter?

Especially if he's played by Josh Brolin, with a wink and a snarl. In Jonah Hex (based on the DC Comic series of the same name), Brolin portrays the title character, a crusty drifter with a chip on his tattered shoulder: Years earlier a baddie by the name of Quentin Turnbull (a relatively restrained John Malkovich -- for once he cuts the scenery into bite-size morsels before chewing it) killed Jonah's family and then, very meanly, used a flaming branding iron to imprint his initials on Jonah's cheek. Later, as we see, Jonah blurs that telltale "QT" via a crude do-it-yourself heat treatment (don't try this at home), which perhaps improves his appearance at least slightly: The right side of his face is a soft mass of puckered flesh, with a little hole near the corner of his mouth. This makes it hard for him to drink whiskey, but he manages.

It also makes him irresistible to Lilah, the hottie at the local brothel; she's played by Megan Fox, who doesn't have to do much here other than have a 23-inch waist (helped along by some spectacular corsetry). But Jonah has little time for kissin' and huggin': Turnbull, with the help of highly tattooed Irish villain Burke (Michael Fassbender), has gotten a hold of some glowing orbs capable of destroying whole nations -- towns, even. President Ulysses S. Grant (played, in a brilliant stroke of casting, by a whiskery Aidan Quinn) enlists grumpy Jonah's help in stopping Turnbull, promising him a Dr. Zizmor gift certificate for some dermabrasion if he succeeds.

Jonah, embittered but noble, don't need no stinking dermabrasion, but he does get his man, and he gets the girl, too. Jonah Hex was directed by Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who!) and written by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (the Crank guys). (Neveldine & Taylor, along with William Farmer, also conceived the story, based on the DC Comics characters.) The picture clocks in at a trim, tidy 80 minutes -- it's blessedly and remarkably free of bloat. In that short period of time, Hayward tries out a number of approaches and styles, some of which work better than others. There are some simple but nifty special effects here (Jonah, after his own near-death experience, has a special gift for conversing with the dead); there's also an elaborate train-jacking sequence that's potentially exciting, particularly as the villains' horses gather speed to catch up with their steam-driven counterpart, although Hayward can't sustain the energy through the whole sequence.

Still, Jonah Hex does have one attribute that sets it apart from nearly every other action movie on the recent landscape. With the exception of a few of the more effects-laden scenes, the cutting here is downright leisurely. Hayward doesn't try to get us hepped up by chopping the action to ribbons, and in places he also strives for an elegiac tone: At times Jonah Hex carries whispery echoes of The Searchers and Sam Peckinpah. Jonah's suffering is the usual alone-in-the-landscape business, but Hayward at least tries to find some poetry in his desolation. At one point Jonah approaches a cemetery on horseback -- there's a corpse in there what needs talkin' to -- and Hayward uses a simple wide shot to capture the idea that, among a mass of white headstones with rotting bodies beneath them, Jonah at least has the meager advantage of being alive.

Brolin appears to be having some fun here -- he plays Jonah's bitterness with cartoon-y lightness, instead of making the mistake of trying to channel Clint Eastwood. And he has some lovely scenes with a shaggy old dog who takes a shine to him and begins following him everywhere. The dog gazes at him with searching, trusting eyes, and he responds with straightforward, gruffly affectionate growling. Jonah Hex could be bigger, louder and longer, with more special effects and faster cutting, but it errs on the side of simplicity. And to that, let's all raise a shotglass.