Jonah HexSave

The film opens with extensive flashback narration from Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) himself, recounting his Civil War-era background. Hex was a Confederate Army soldier whose final wartime mission involved disobeying direct orders from his commanding officer Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). The disobedience, intended to prevent civilian casualties at a Union-controlled medical facility, resulted in the death of Turnbull's own son Jeb. Turnbull's revenge for his son's death was the systematic execution of Hex's wife and young son in front of Hex himself, followed by the branding of Hex's facial flesh with a red-hot QT iron that produced the disfigurement which has defined his subsequent identity.

The opening flashback continues to establish Hex's supernatural-ability inheritance. Hex was nursed back from near-death by a Crow Nation tribal medicine man whose ritualistic intervention produced an unintended supernatural side effect: Hex's body now retains a tenuous connection to the dead world, allowing him to briefly communicate with the spirits of recently-deceased individuals. His ability is limited to short-duration engagements with the recently dead and requires physical contact with the corpse to activate. The ability has become Hex's primary investigative tool in his subsequent career as a bounty hunter.

The main narrative picks up in 1876, with the United States approaching its centennial anniversary. Hex has been operating as a private-contract bounty hunter for several years, traveling across the American Southwest with his ammunition-mule and an arsenal of unconventional weapons including dynamite-tipped crossbow bolts, twin shoulder-mounted Gatling guns, and an explosive-shell-equipped revolver. His professional reputation has been built on his willingness to accept impossible bounties that other hunters refuse. His emotional life is limited to his romantic relationship with Lilah (Megan Fox), a young woman whose work at a frontier-town brothel he has been periodically visiting.

Hex's involvement in the main plot begins when he is contacted by U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) through a special-emissary courier. The President needs Hex's services for a national-security-priority mission: Quentin Turnbull, presumed dead at the Civil War's end, has resurfaced as the leader of a Confederate-loyalist criminal network operating throughout the American Southwest. Turnbull has obtained an experimental super-weapon called the Eden Project, capable of mass-casualty city-destruction through advanced ballistic-payload delivery. Turnbull intends to detonate the weapon at Washington D.C. during the upcoming centennial celebration, an act that would kill tens of thousands of American civilians and destabilize the federal government.

Hex accepts the mission for personal reasons. The opportunity to confront Turnbull directly, after twelve years of presumed-dead resignation, allows Hex to finally close the family-revenge throughline that has defined his post-war life. The President's offer also includes a presidential pardon for all Hex's prior bounty-hunter-related criminal activities, which the federal government has been monitoring across the years. Hex's investigation begins by reaching out to the few remaining members of Turnbull's pre-war crew, several of whom Hex tracks through frontier-town saloons and Texas-prairie hideouts.

The investigation's progression brings Hex into combat with Burke (Michael Fassbender), Turnbull's primary lieutenant. Burke's combat skills are exceptional, and his loyalty to Turnbull has been consolidated through years of shared criminal operations. Their multiple encounters across the picture provide the film's primary supporting-villain combat throughline. Burke's particular cruelty includes the murder of Lilah, an attack that Hex narrowly prevents through coordinated intervention but which fundamentally raises the personal stakes of Hex's pursuit.

Hex's tracking of Turnbull's operations leads him to a remote Texas mining-and-research facility where the Eden Project has been under final assembly. The weapon's design includes both conventional-explosive payload delivery and a coordinated firing-system that allows it to be deployed from a custom-built Confederate ironclad warship traveling on the Potomac River. Turnbull's plan: position the warship at Washington's harbor during the centennial celebration, deploy the Eden Project across the assembled federal-government dignitaries, and proceed to launch a coordinated military counter-revolution to restore Confederate political authority across the southern states.

The third-act extended action sequence takes place aboard Turnbull's ironclad warship as it approaches Washington D.C. Hex's coordinated assault on the warship involves his entire arsenal of weapons, his supernatural-ability assistance from various recently-killed crew members whose corpses he interrogates briefly, and his coordinated-combat-tactics learning from the President's specialized military advisors. The ship-board battle is intercut with the Washington D.C. centennial celebration's continued unawareness of the approaching threat. The Eden Project's deployment mechanism is activated mid-river but Hex manages to disrupt the weapon's targeting-system through coordinated mechanical-intervention.

The Hex-versus-Turnbull single-combat resolution is the picture's emotional climax. Turnbull, recognizing that his Eden Project has failed, attempts to escape via the ironclad's emergency-evacuation lifeboat. Hex pursues him through the ship's burning interior, finally cornering him in the engine room. Their confrontation is brief: Hex shoots Turnbull through the head with his explosive-shell revolver, then briefly communicates with Turnbull's corpse to confirm Turnbull's recognition of his defeat. The film's epilogue shows Hex receiving the President's gratitude in a Washington private-meeting setting; the offered presidential-pardon is declined as Hex prefers his outlaw-bounty-hunter identity. Hex departs for the American Southwest to resume his pre-war professional life with Lilah, whose injuries from Burke's earlier attack have substantially recovered.

Jonah Hex grossed $11 million globally on a $47 million budget, an unprecedented commercial failure that effectively ended DC's planned Western-superhero-genre expansion. The picture's troubled production reportedly involved multiple director-changes, extensive third-act reshoots, and an unusually-aggressive post-production-cut that reduced the picture's final theatrical runtime to under ninety minutes. Josh Brolin's lead performance was widely cited as the picture's strongest individual element despite the broader narrative weaknesses. John Malkovich's Turnbull villain role provided the actor with a substantial dramatic showcase that was largely undermined by the picture's compressed editing. Megan Fox's Lilah role was widely criticized as underwritten and overly-objectified, an industrial-practice complaint that contributed to the picture's reception lessons regarding female-character treatment in genre productions. The character's broader franchise-development was permanently impaired by the picture's reception; subsequent DC standalone productions have deliberately avoided Western-superhero-genre material. The picture's expedited eighty-one-minute theatrical runtime was widely cited as evidence of substantial cut-content during post-production; subsequent home-video releases did not include the missing material, suggesting that the cut footage may have been considered unsalvageable rather than commercially viable for additional release. Michael Shannon's brief role in the picture was widely noted as a wasted casting opportunity given the actor's significant dramatic capabilities, an industrial-practice concern that paralleled similar criticism of Megan Fox's underwritten Lilah role. The picture's musical-score contributions by the band Mastodon, an unusual creative choice for a comic-book-genre production, drew significant critical attention but did not compensate for the broader-narrative weaknesses. The film's Will Arnett-narrated trailer marketing campaign was widely cited as one of the era's most-mismatched promotional efforts, suggesting a comedic-irony tonal direction that did not match the picture's earnest Western-action-genre execution. Composer Marco Beltrami's musical score and additional contributions by the band Mastodon were widely cited as one of the picture's few-praised individual elements despite the broader-reception concerns.