Published: 02 September 2010
by DAN CARRIER

JONAH Hex was a little-known DC comic book in the 1970s that earned a dedicated cult following. 

Director Jimmy ­Hayward has taken the series and made a faithful film version. It means you get an hour and a half of a comic strip on screen, and if you like pulp comics you’ll love this. Otherwise, it’s a flimsy excuse for an action adventure, riddled with Wild West clichés and simple, obvious scenes. 

Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a former Confederate soldier wandering through Ansel Adams scenery after his side has lost the Civil War. Like the Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales (the writers of the DC comic books were heavily influenced by the popularity of the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s) Jonah is forced to watch his ­family killed by good-for-nothing Confederate general Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich).

To say the pair have a grudge against each ­other does not quite do their dislike justice. We learn that Jonah was in a regiment with ­Turnbull’s son, and the pair were buddies. But when they get orders from Pater to burn down a hospital, he fights Turnbull junior and kills him, sparking off a feud. Turnbull senior in turn massacres Hex’s family, and leaves him for dead. 

Rescued by Native American medicine men, he is somehow imbued with powers that make him as tough as old boots. His mystical forces also allow him to lay his hands on corpses, bringing them temporarily back to life, so he can have a pow-wow with the other side and call on them for advice.

But before Hex is  able to reek revenge, ­Turnbull fakes his own death: it leaves the hero to wander flea-pit towns as a bounty hunter, thinking his number one enemy has perished in a fire. 

But he is then called on by President Grant, who is organising the USA’s 100th birthday party. We learn that Turnbull is alive and has laid his hands on a ­Victorian weapon of mass destruction that he is aiming at Capitol Hill in the hope of re-­igniting the Civil War. Hex, helped by his ­prostitute girlfriend Lilah, has to stop him.

Brolin, who performed so well in the Coen Brothers film No Country For Old Men, has little to do but look grizzled. A face of ­prosthetics means he has but one expression. John Malkovich, taking on the role of mega-­baddie Turnbull, has no such excuses. All he does is growl and look menacing.

It is preposterous, but you don’t do comics for realism. 

It is also wonderfully short and doesn’t ­pretend to be an epic. And while this film could be enjoyed just as much if you checked your brain at the cloakroom, it is a plausible attempt at pouring a comic book faithfully into another medium.