Man, maybe it would have been better marketing if they hadn’t released a trailer at all. The buzz on “Jonah Hex,” which has been bad ever since Josh Brolin, the star of the movie, announced to the world that the script sucked, seems to have reached poisonous levels in the past few weeks, culminating in some universally dreadful test screening reviews earlier in the week. Ten seconds of footage leaked earlier in the week, and now a full trailer‘s finally arrived. Where to start…oh brother.
Many of those reviews from earlier in the week compared the film to “Wild Wild West,” which we think is kind of unfair, because this looks much, much worse than the Will Smith disaster. Beginning with the origins of Hex’s facial scarring, as John Malkovich brands him and kills his family, the cornball stentorian voiceover then kicks in with the immortal line “After that night, some say he was a changed man.” Well, yeah, he’s a changed man, he’s walking around looking like Frank Langella in “The Box.”
There’s so many truly awful moments in here that it’s hard to know where to start, but among them are Hex vomiting up a crow, the horse gatling-gun scene, that the trailer includes no fewer than 10 explosions in the last 60 seconds and the seemingly random shot of what seems to be one of the super-vampires from “Blade 2.” If you thought there was any risk of getting involved in the film at any point, Will Arnett and Lance Reddick (“The Wire,” “Fringe”) turn up in some Richard Kelly-level stunt casting, while Brolin’s performance, which we hoped would be one of the few bright spots in the film, looks awful; it’s genuinely hard to make out most of his lines, particularly in the super-lame coda.
It doesn’t even look like he might be laughably bad, it just looks “Catwoman”-bad. A look at the final credit block reveals Matt LeBlanc, Joey from “Friends,” is an executive producer on the film. It figures.