‘Jonah Hex’ posters embrace the cliché

I know, I know… you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Or a movie by its poster. After all, movie posters are not made in the garage behind the filmmaker’s house, with a camera, a number two pencil, an Exacto-Knife and some gumption. They’re not an expression of the artistic vision behind the film in question. They’re an expression of the fears of a marketing department, and they’re made in gray-carpeted cubicles.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that they’re made by artists. But I hear that more often than not these artists end each job by offing themselves. Good thing we’ve got art schools! You’d off yourself too if it was your hand moving the pixels but a “global brand strategist” standing over your shoulder.

Which results in this:

Boring.

And this:

Dull.

And this:

Somnolent.

And let’s not forget this:

Wake me when it's over.

These four blahtastic posters make up the first outdoor campaign for the movie Jonah Hex, the highly anticipated summer blockbuster-in-waiting. Like most poster campaigns of the last decade or so, they’ve gone the character-specific route. This is so expected now that it’s become a cliché. Clichés aren’t always bad, of course. Tarantino went with the character-posters for Basterds, but his were more graphic, and rather than featuring the actual characters, they features his characters’ instruments of pain. He made it his own.

Not so with Hex. Look at the backgrounds. What is that, a repeated title graphic? Really? Just big blown-up text at a canted angle as a background element, the only background element? Nice.

If people want to see this movie (anymore) it’s because of Josh Brolin. The guy’s on fire. He can (or at least, could) do no wrong. It’s actually pretty refreshing to have the heat falling on a guy who kinda sorta deserves it. Instead of, say, that creature fourth from the left. The only one, of course, to get the medium shot. And Michael Fassbender is also hot right now, very hot, and he too deserves the heat. He almost single-handedly shouldered Fish Tank, a good small movie that nobody saw. And he should have been in Basterds more than he was. He gave Hunger its soul. Yet in this poster, for some reason, they made him look like Jude Law. No, like Jude Law after making out with Mike Tyson.

I wonder what, if any, affect this lame campaign will have on anticipation. Remember when the first trailer for Avatar landed? A collective “meh” heard round the world. Of course, that might well have been a clever ploy on Cameron’s part to tamp down expectation that had grown beyond Biblical proportions. By the time the second trailer rolled out of the gate, most people would have been happy with old Abyss footage re-cut to a new song. Instead, we got a great trailer. And a lesson: its story, not spectacle, that counts. Of course, the film itself proved exactly the opposite point.

Fans issued a similar “meh” to the Hex trailer when it hit. So, does Jimmy Hayward, computer animator-turned-filmmaker, have any Cameronesque tricks up his sleeve? I kinda doubt it. The guy’s only previous experience in the chair which says “Director” was on Horton Hears a Who!

Far more than a quartet of lame-ass imagineless posters, it’s these three little words – Jimmy Hayward, Director – that brings the cowboy boot down on my hopes.