Jonah Hex is the live action movie of the comic book tale of the same name. Set in the years after the US Civil War, it features a horribly scarred anti-hero, played by Josh Brolin, who’s able to communicate with the dead. This nifty trick allows him to track down the dastardly, mass-murderous Quintin Turnbull – the man who killed Hex’s family, has kidnapped his spunky mistress and is coincidentally planning to murder American president Grant.
Remember the excruciating Wild Wild West – with its fiendish villains, its louche showgirls, and its anachronistic weapons of mass destruction? It was rubbish, wasn’t it? And Hex is similar in some ways. But it’s saved from comparison with that earlier dross by being really beautifully filmed; every daylight scene is saturated in rich primary colours of remarkable intensity (though the less we talk about the night scenes the better – you just can’t see what’s going on.) The special effects are chilling, the performances are consistent and all in all I didn’t think it deserved the absolute panning it received from the critics.
In spite of the Western subject matter, Jonah Hex filmed mostly in Louisiana – an interesting showcase, I thought, of the variety and diversity of locations. The New Orleans City Park does stand in for Mexico, and there’s even a prairie scene with a locomotive steaming across the plain, that was filmed in the town of Raceland.