I haven’t been in the theaters for a while, and I have noticed that things have become a little more expensive, which means that movies have to be all the better to make it worth the money (about $20 a person). I took a little gamble on my first time back and I saw a movie I really didn’t know much about. Jonah Hex, directed by Jimmy Hayward, based on the DC comic book, albeit a few changes in the movie. Overall the movie was decent, with decent acting and a decent plotline.

Jonah Hex is set in civil- war period America just before the fourth of July. It opens with a nice graphic explaining things up to the plot point. Jonah is a confederate soldier who comes to his senses and betrays the army to do what’s right. Hex becomes an outlaw in the south, fighting against the confederates, he kills the family of Quintin Turnbull, which in turn comes to bite him in the ass as Quintin ties him to a cross and kills his family and makes Hex watch as his family is burned alive. Turnbull then takes a hot branding iron and brands Hex’s face with the initials QT (which later he burns off with a tomahawk leaving him with a brutal scar). He is found near death by native Americans who then try to bring him back to life, but instead Hex walks a void between life and death where he can now touch and wake up the dead to talk to them. Hex, with a heart filled with vengeance, hunts for Turnbull but finds that he burned himself alive. Hex then becomes a bounty hunter, and in turn gets a price put on his head. The union army finds that Turnbull is alive and is planning on destroying America with a secret weapon. The general then decides to summon Hex to fight against Turnbull and stop him before he can blow up the north with a nuke- like secret weapon.

First, I want to talk about the plot. It differs quite a bit from the comic book in Hex’s upbringing, which I don’t find appealing at all, and the new plot that they wrote has a lot of holes in it. They don’t explain the relationship between Hex’s character and Megan fox’s character, Lilah. At least she’s not just eye candy, she does plenty of ass- kicking on her own. There are also many holes in the relationship between Hex and turnbull; I didn’t understand what was going on between them half the time, and why Hex turned on him. They also randomly would switch to different times in the plotline, which got a little confusing. Also, the story was a little too short. It was just action after action after action, they really didn’t slow the movie down at all. Toward the end, they kept switching back and forth between the actual boss battle and some random dream battle between the same two people, which just got annoying.

The action was done really well though. There are a lot of cool western shootouts and and really cool fight sequences. The camera was steady throughout which I liked, and Hex, in a couple scenes, had some really cool weapons at his disposal, but for how action- packed the movie was, I would have liked to see more of these cool weapons, also one of those slow- mo shots of the bullet soaring through the air would be cool too.

The acting was alright. Not everyone really had the wild- west accents (except for Brolin and Megan Fox who did a stellar job.) There was not a whole lot of emotion in the movie, which again goes back to the storyline really. Josh Brolin also mumbled a lot which made it quite hard to understand what he was saying. The acting also seemed… forced. A lot of the actors did not really capture the characters for me, which is a major nail in the coffin for this movie. Megan Fox was really the only stand- out actor in the movie, but she always does a great job. Also some of the characters seemed to have posh British accents, which really made no sense.

Another blow for the movie was there was almost no character development. I really had no idea who anyone was or why they were even there. The pictured Hex as a vengence- ruled madman who gets a sick pleasure from killing, and Turnbull as a complete sociopath hell bent on killing everyone, and Fox’s character was practically an ass- kicking prostitute. Turnbull’s minions seemed brainless and anyone else was rather insignificant.

I did like the background music, which consisted of wild- west style guitar or banjo, at sometimes having electric instruments, and even some full songs. The music did set the mood very well, and at the right breaks, the lighting was both realistic and dramatic, setting the mood as well. (one of the only things that the director did right.)

Overall, the movie really wasn’t worth the twenty dollars (that’s ticket and refreshments), but it was still a cool action ride. Unfortunately, I had to pee the entire time, so it was a little harder to concentrate. The movie was mediocre, not the best, but not the worst. There are many improvements that could be made, but there are a couple things that they did well. It would be a cool movie to watch with friends on a boring Saturday night, but I don’t think it’s worth the money in theaters.

In a rating… 4.5 out of 10 stars.