Jonah Hex (2010)

Jonah Hex arrives at the tail end of a decade that still permitted a comic-book Western to be about nothing at all. Josh Brolin glowers beneath prosthetics, John Malkovich chews the scenery as a Confederate officer with a grudge, and the whole enterprise collapses in eighty-one minutes. The Civil War sits in the background as set dressing, a source of costumes and accents, never a subject for comment. A disfigured bounty hunter chasing the man who burned his family is not a premise that invites reflection on the national sin. It invites a tomahawk. The film obliges.

The women fare predictably. Megan Fox plays Lilah, a gun-toting prostitute introduced in a brothel who spends the third act tied up as bait. She is a plot device with a corset, and the film never pretends otherwise. The Crow people appear only to heal the hero and hand him supernatural errands, a function that exhausts their participation. Lance Reddick turns up briefly as an armorer and is gone. None of this is framed as anything. The movie has no thesis beyond revenge, and revenge does not require a position statement.

There is no room in such a production for sermonizing, and none is attempted. No environmental parable, no economic critique, no reconsideration of the past, no invitation to examine the body or the mind. It is a film that wanted only to be a film, and barely managed that. For the cultural archaeologist, it is a clean specimen: a blockbuster with no message, no agenda, and no audience. The tie-in dolls sold separately, which tells you most of what the studio believed it had.