There’s a sense of optimism surrounding the new DCU that Superman will inaugurate this summer. James Gunn’s reboot universe already has some question marks, but surely anything would be an improvement over the old DCEU — the so-called Snyderverse was revered by hardcore fans, but to the rest of us, it was an increasingly dull slog through pointlessly grim tales.
But we haven’t come here to bury the Snyderverse. We haven’t come to praise it, either, God no, but we can acknowledge its relative competence. The Snyderverse had a vision, even if that vision was fueled by Monster energy drinks and malaise. The same cannot be said for many of the comic book movies that preceded it in the years before Marvel’s interconnected adventures remade the genre, because as messy as DC’s first shared universe was, it was still a huge step up from the company’s previous strategy of releasing random and usually awful standalone films.
Sure, the pre-serialization 2000s gave us The Dark Knight, but we also got Catwoman, Green Lantern, and, 15 years ago today, Jonah Hex, a film so shockingly inept it couldn’t even achieve the infamy of Halle Berry strolling into a club and ordering a tall glass of cream. You almost certainly don’t remember Jonah Hex, but you should, because it’s a reminder of how good we’ve really had it.
Jonah Hex stars Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex, a DC antihero too obscure to carry a standalone superhero film in 2010. This version of Hex is a Confederate soldier who defied orders from his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, for some reason), to burn down a Union hospital, then shot Turnbull’s son in the ensuing kerfuffle. Turnbull responded by butchering Hex’s family and leaving him to suffer, and Hex’s brush with mortality, combined with a bit of noble savage nonsense, gave him the ability to speak to the dead. Hex becomes a brooding bounty hunter, but soon learns that Turnbull faked his demise and is plotting to destroy America with ye olde superweapon.
That’s the kind of premise that can produce a perfectly mediocre movie, but Jonah Hex feels like it was written by Garth Marenghi, in that it considers subtext to be for cowards. “This is for my wife,” Hex grunts, while avenging his wife. “Please, let the innocents go,” a doomed soldier begs Turnbull, who declines to let the innocents go. This movie thinks so little of its audience that, after a young soldier informs Hex that Turnbull is still alive, we cut to voiceover of Brolin growling, “Turnbull is alive.” Yeah, we heard.
And so, with respect to its scattered defenders — like halloweenjunkie666 and their YouTube review, “Movie rocks!!!!” — Jonah Hex does not, in fact, rock. Any film where slack-jawed dullards go out of their way to antagonize an infamous marksman with horse-mounted gatling guns should have its tongue wedged deep enough in its cheek to taste last night’s dinner, but Jonah Hex is so exhaustingly self-serious it makes all 27 hours of Zack Snyder's Justice League feel like a breezy screwball comedy.
A monotonous Brolin plays down to the material, which puts him on the same level as his costars. A miscast Megan Fox plays a prostitute who exists to tell Hex he’s wonderful, while a miscast Will Arnett plays an officer who exists to tell Hex he’s an anachronism. The former spends most of her time being menaced by men, while the latter spends most of his time coming across like Gob Bluth stumbled onto a film set and decided to roll with it. By the time boilerplate hard rock blasts over Hex stoically riding away from a burning building for the second time, you’ve realized this might be the first 81-minute film to feel bloated.
We’re not picking on this 15-year-old movie because it’s bad; we’re picking on it because it’s bad. When a movie shorter than some dentist appointments finds the time to include a fight that occurs only in Hex’s dreams, something has gone horribly wrong. Brolin and Fox would later decry the film, and when you’re done with Jonah Hex you’ll think The Marvels and Black Adam are masterpieces.
That sense of perspective is precisely why we should appreciate it. Fifteen years is not a long time by many measures, but for the superhero film, it’s an epoch. Three years after Jonah Hex was gunned down at the box office, Man of Steel would launch DC’s attempt to compete against the growing MCU, and this miserable era of standalone oddballs would sputter to an end.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a good standalone film, and at this point, the superhero genre could probably benefit from one. But the Snyderverse, even at its Martha-est, was more intriguing than what DC was shoveling out beforehand. And as the new DCU launches to almost impossible expectations, it’s worth remembering that even a flawed plan is better than absolutely no plan at all.
