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Following box office disappointments like ‘The Spirit’, ‘Watchmen’ and ‘Scott Pilgrim’, could ‘Jonah Hex’ finally call time on Hollywood’s love affair with the online fanboy community and the obscure comic-book titles they’re so obsessed with? It’s already sunk in the States but that could have as much to do with the poor quality of the movie as the unfamiliar material. It’s the 1870s, and Jonah (Josh Brolin), a hideously scarred Civil War veteran, is seeking revenge on the Confederate general (John Malkovich) who murdered his family. Oh, and for reasons left largely unexplained, he can talk to the dead.
It’s this kind of headscratching development that makes ‘Jonah Hex’ feel like a film aimed squarely at fans: uninitiated viewers will find themselves perplexed and quickly annoyed by the script’s tendency to throw talking corpses, mutant cage fighters and mysterious chemical weapons into what might have been a perfectly serviceable action western. At 81 minutes with credits, ‘Jonah Hex’ feels crude, lazy and entirely perfunctory.