MOVIE REVIEWS: “JONAH HEX”
Manohla Dargis in her New York Times review surprisingly mentions the bad buzz and tracking studies associated with the release of Jonah Hex this weekend. “Though it has bad word of mouth,” she writes, the movie “is generally better, sprier and more diverting than most of the action flicks now playing, The A-Team included.” Likewise, in the New York Post, Kyle Smith predicts that “critics are likely to scoff” at the movie, yet “there’s a colorful damnation lurking in the movie’s haunted soul. With its cast of raging rogues and its scorched, surreal atmosphere, it occupies a space somewhere between The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (though I don’t claim this film is equal to those two classics).” Most critics do indeed scoff at the movie. “Revisionist history nonsense,” is the way Claudia Puig describes it in USA Today. Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer refers to it as “a lamentably uninteresting adaptation of the DC Comic.” “Cut-and-paste filmmaking at its crudest,” remarks Tom Maurstad in the Dallas Morning News. And Peter Howell concludes in the Toronto Star: “You know what it is about hexes; they’re awfully hard to remove, once acquired, and Jonah Hex seems well and truly cursed.”
