The role Josh Brolin wants to delete from history: “It was a shitty fucking movie”
Despite being the son of James Brolin, the stepson of Barbra Streisand, and landing an early role in Richard Donner’s beloved The Goonies, Josh Brolin was two decades into his career before he became a star.
He was working solidly, but that breakthrough simply didn’t materialise. Of course, it didn’t help that he was starring in forgettable dreck like Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, Into the Blue, The Mod Squad, and Best Laid Plans, and it wasn’t until 2007 that he finally enjoyed a year to remember.
Within the space of a few months, Brolin delivered a solid performance in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, an even better one in Tommy Lee Jones’ crime drama In the Valley of Elah, and the best of his entire career in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Since then, he hasn’t looked back.
The following year, he notched an Academy Award nomination for Gus Van Sant’s Milk, and he was suddenly a viable commodity. Unfortunately, Brolin fell into a trap that has affected so many actors seeking to capitalise on their newfound momentum and cement their newfound position on the Hollywood ladder.
One of the industry’s preferred pathways is for actors sitting right on the cusp of fame, or who have recently attained it, to try their luck at leading a blockbuster. In Brolin’s case, he doubled up by making it a comic book adaptation, only for Jonah Hex to emerge as one of its genre’s most egregious affronts.
Butchered in post-production to try and perform a salvage job on an unsalvageable picture, the movie was released at a brisk 81 minutes, which didn’t do a thing to prevent it from ending up as the worst-reviewed leading role in his filmography, becoming one of the lowest-grossing comic book movies of the modern era in the process.
On paper, a supernatural western that boasted Brolin, Michael Fassbender, John Malkovich, Michael Shannon, and Lance Reddick looked as though it had potential, but looks can be deceiving. Brolin has spent the last decade and a half distancing himself from his biggest disaster, and he can’t be faulted for the reasons why.
“I won’t ever stop shitting on Jonah Hex,” he told GQ. “Because it’s a shitty fucking movie.” Truer words have never been spoken, because anyone unfortunate enough to lay eyes on the ill-judged and ill-fated feature can concur that it is, in fact, a shitty fucking movie.
Combining two popular genres into one terrible film would be enough to swear anyone off both, but Brolin didn’t let his miserable experience derail his participation in either. He returned to comic books with Deadpool 2 and as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thanos, while he revisited the western in Outer Range, albeit with a fantastical twist.
