Jonah Hex [PG-13]: Not as bad as expected but badly wrapped in revisionist history, Jonah Hex is a cinder-punk embrace of the western. Set in 1877, twelve years after the Civil War ended, this comic book adaptation screws around with both the time period and its title character to the point where future events are trivialized.

In September 1965, a Rod Serling production titled The Loner was aired on CBS. Nobody much remembers the short-lived series where Lloyd Bridges played an ex-Union cavalry officer out west after the Civil War, who would appear as a silhouette riding across the hillside like a spectral wanderer injected into troubled times. Around that same time, Leone's spaghetti westerns had reinvigorated theatrical westerns with serape-wearing gunslingers and landlocked, cold-blooded pirates. Jonah Hex, an ex-Confederate turned bounty hunter, premiered soon after in All Star Western #10 (March 1972), and was built in response to all that as well as the visceral Peckinpah western.

It must be remembered, as well, that this was the age when sword & sorcery and swamp monsters dominated comic sales. By 1972, the western had faded from the public consciousness, represented on the small screen by monthly installments of Hec Ramsey starring Richard Boone, and David Carradine's Kung Fu. Hex was a hit because it had an element of supernatural vengeance to it.

There's always been a dark side to the Old West. In black & white episodes of Gunsmoke, there were twisted preachers and devious hillbillies, but Hex was far removed from the usual Cowboys & Indians horseplay.

Just as it became "incorrect" to set Tarzan movies in Africa, shipping him out to Thailand and South America because Amazon-Americans don't have much of a block vote, Jonah Hex justifies him as a traitorous ex-Confederate soldier claiming he never was much for slavery. He's given a back-story where after being ordered to torch a hospital, Hex defects, selling out his regiment and causing the death of the son of his commanding officer, Col. Turnbull. The ensuing blood feud costs Hex his family, who are buried alive while his face is scarred.

Left for dead, he's nursed back to life by local Indians and empowered with the ability to lay hands on dead things, reanimating them for brief conversations??!

So Jonah Hex takes a revenge story and twists its lead character into Tru Calling. But why?

Worst of all is the subplot about Turnbull developing a doomsday weapon to take out the United States involving glowing orbs! Primitive atom bombs? Or a plot that's been lifted directly from the FOX TV series back in '93, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., where a maniacal criminal searches for mystical globes that have the power to "bring the dead back to life"? With a black bounty hunter, Bruce Campbell met the twentieth century head on. Turnbull gloats how the U.S. won't reach its second centennial.

When Hex visits a dry goods store, the shop owner is a black man who has access to rocket launchers and Gatling guns. It's 1877 and here's a black guy who not only got a bank loan to start a business but is also a weapons dealer on the sly?! Then why, like Schindler, didn't he arm black folk to prevent any further lynchings?

Does a comic book have to accurately connect to history? No, but a movie needs to represent its source material. Hollywood can't turn Jonah Hex into a hero when he's an anti-hero for a reason. Contemporizing situations to ridiculous proportions is laughable when Turnbull's henchman is tattooed up his neck, and whores look like Megan Fox rather than Nancy Kulp.

We know from Kurosawa's Yojimbo that once the gun is introduced, the days of the sword are numbered. Yet even though Hex has an advanced arsenal at his disposal, he remains a faithful hatchet-man!

Josh Brolin looks the part of a man who can, if need be, fight evil with evil. He looks nothing like Timmy the Timid Ghost! He doesn't need to have a crow flying out of his mouth, or hoodoo Brother Voodoo magic to compete with science.

The Old West was a time and place where a man could die from a toothache, or be shot for snoring. The movie Jonah Hex is hexed by delusions of correctness, and a repugnant disregard for accuracy, thus missing entirety the simplicity of soul in the comics.