Category: Action
Some graphic novels want to be movies. The art form, although dependent on the theater of the mind (aka your imagination), lends itself to be the closest thing the written word can be to the multimedia extravaganza today's Hollywood movies are. In fact, movie storyboards, which is a key tool in planning and developing movies, resembles a graphic novel without dialog.
Some movies want to be graphic novels. Why? Why try? The graphic novel is powered by imagination. How ever the director tries to create something to replace your imagination, you can probably imagine something more. More stylish, more beautiful and more action-packed. All a director can aim for is to distill the essence of a graphic novel and work with that, perhaps extending it a bit more in one or two directions. Case in point: Hellboy. Director Guillermo del Toro understood the Hellboy backstory and focused on known and loved traits of the character. He then added the love story with Liz Sherman. The movie was both a tribute to the novels as well as bringing the story to people who would not normally buy a graphic novel. But distill a graphic novel too much and you end up with Judge Dread. Some graphic novels are simply not just film-able as exemplified in the Punisher movies.
Which brings us to Jonah Hex. To say the movie went everywhere is a kind statement. It was schizophrenic at best. It could not decide whether to be stylized western (Danger! Wild, Wild, West area) or a comicbook super hero movie. It jumped from superpower show-off scenes to supposedly dramatic encounters to animated flash backs to dream-while-awake sequences to Wild E. Coyote-esque set-ups (I was genuinely looking for the Acme logo on the boxes of explosives). At some point, I was thinking, "How many people were directing this movie?"What a waste of talent this movie was. Most reviews blame Megan Fox but I think she was just a victim as Josh Borlin and John Malkovich was. An actor never really knows how the movie will look like once it is edited and CG are added. For them, the gamble was lost.
For us, what could have been a great story is lost.
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