.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

1. Being one of the few that thought the Jonah Hex trailer looked promising, I embarked on my late night screening of Jonah Hex with expectations that the film would entertain and amuse me on its way to possibly becoming a film franchise. 75 minutes later, my dream was over.

Jonah Hex stars Josh Brolin as the title character - a disfigured bounty hunter - that makes a deal with the U.S. Military to help stop a terrorist who is working on a weapon he intends on using to destroy Washington, DC. This terrorist comes in the form of Confederate officer Turnbull (played by the usually reliable John Malkovich) and his gang of thugs which includes Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender as Burke.

Seems Hex has reason to seek out Turnbull who is the reason why Jonah has a face resembling something from Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness. Turnbull also killed Hex's wife and child so the usual western references and plot points are all accounted for in full.

Over the next hour, punches will fly, things will blow up, guns, crossbows and dynamite will be put to good use - all with the intention of providing audiences the summer diversion that the trailer promised.

By the time Jonah Hex is over (and I will get to that momentarily), you will have sat through 75 minutes of mindless, stale and uninspired scenes where everything that should happen in a film of this ilk does and nothing is there to surprise or inspire us.

Not since Van Helsing have I sat through a movie that had as much action as Jonah Hex and been completely numb to what was transpiring on screen. I didn't get involved and didn't care either way.

That's not to say there weren't a few good scenes. Brolin's character rambles off a couple of good lines ("I cut myself shaving"), but other times it was difficult to understand his muttering through all the latex and make-up applied to make his face look like it is just about to fall off. And having the Gatling guns hidden under a poncho on his horse was cool when they were fired up. But that is where the love ends.

Brolin seems to be sleepwalking through a role that doesn't ask him to relay much emotion. He's a cross between Clint Eastwood and Frankenstein and you might find yourself laughing more at him than with him. Malkovich is a sleaze, but we have seen him in these types of roles before, so nothing new there. Maybe the biggest disappointment comes in the corset form of Megan Fox. Fox - who has closed more Hollywood doors than she has opened in the past 12 months - shows what many of us having been writing for the past two years. She is good to look at, but can't act her way out of Celebrity Rehab. Luckily, here time on screen is short lived and the tight outfit gave us reason not to look at her over emoted facial expressions.

Just hours away from the screening, I don't remember much from the film. Don't care to. But what I do recall was how short the film was. Some 75 minutes long inside the credits. As a reviewer, I have consistently complained of films over staying their welcome. Judd Apatow films in particular run over 2 hours with only about 90 minutes of worthy material. But running at only 75 minutes, I felt cheated. With $26 invested in two tickets and another $20 cashed in at the concession stand, I felt I deserved at least a 90-minute film. That is what I book off in my head controlled timetable when I sit down to enjoy a feature film. But Jonah was over before some people came back from getting Coke refills. Hard to believe that I am complaining about the shortness of such an inferior film, but hell, for $46 bucks they could have found something else to blow up.