Review: Horror Western 'Jonah Hex'

"This here's my story," says Jonah Hex, the ax-wielding, corpse-whispering, hideously scarred 19th century Western-style bounty hunter at the outset of the film that bears his name.

Thing is, it isn't much of a story. Sure, it's got a hero on an errand of vengeance (Josh Brolin), a hooker with a heart of gold (Megan Fox, corseted to within an inch of her life), an incompetent Irish thug with chin tattoos (Michael Fassbender) and a wacky genocidal villain (John Malkovich) who plans to kill Jonah and, most important, destroy the U.S. government with translucent orange bocce balls. Or something.

It also has several actors with really bad quasi-Southern accents.

Oh, and fire - lots and lots of fire. Explosions, too. Stuff blows up, and I mean constantly; seven scenes (I counted) climax in flames.

Unrepentant pyromaniacs might have a good time. Fans of the selfsame D.C. Comics series should enjoy Brolin's rasping, masculine approach to the mystically gifted Jonah, whose key superpower is the ability to temporarily rouse dead folk for a chat.

The villainous Quentin Turnbull is played by Malkovich, outfitted with Snidely Whiplash grins and something that looks like a David Crosby wig. He's one of several actors who utter inane gobs of dialogue that's either intentionally funny or unintentionally painful, hard to tell which. Aidan Quinn, as President Ulysses S. Grant, gets the worst of it, though Brolin is additionally hampered by a stiff prosthetic kisser that turns every sibilant into mush ("Where'sh Turnbull?").

Visually, "Jonah Hex" is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light. In an effort to vary the tone, director Jimmy Hayward, an animator who co-directed the mostly adorable "Horton Hears a Who!," inserts overexposed fantasy scenes featuring dirt the color of those nation-killing bocce balls. Truth be told, the best part of the film unspools early on, in a bit of cartoon backstory that's rendered with the slashing kinetic imagery of comic-book art.

I wanted to see that movie, the animated one, or at least a live-action version intercut with a few interesting hand-drawn passages. Loath as I am to complain about a short running time, I think "Jonah Hex" could have exceeded 80 minutes to make room for some real visual invention. And three-dimensional characters. And a plot. A plot would have been nice.

-- Advisory: intense sequences of violence and action, disturbing images and sexual content.

E-mail Amy Biancolli at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle