Also confounding expectations is the character of Lilah, a frontier prostitute who is the only person Hex feels he can really trust.

© 2010- Warner Bros.- All Rights ReservedMegan Fox in Warner Bros. Pictures' 'Jonah Hex

Megan Fox, who plays Lilah, says, "Josh and I had a conversation about what their past relationship could have been and why she would be so dedicated and so in love with someone who treated her the way that he did and was not able to love. We came up with a back story between the two of us about what things had gone on in the past and why she was so dedicated to him, so loyal and hurt for him so badly."

She admits to having trouble with some of the big guns her character has to wield. It was really difficult for me to shoot the old-style 'gunslinger' guns because I have tiny little baby hands and (the guns) are really large and heavy, so just the physicality of actually having to pull that off was really difficult. This was more action-heavy for me …the action in this movie was more intricate than in previous movies that I've done," she says.

Fox, now 24, became a pop culture phenomenon after co-starring in the first two "Transformer" action films and says she is at home in genre. "I like working on action films and I like working on movies that are comic book based or have sort of this theme because there are things that I watched or loved when I was a kid," she says.

"Jonah Hex" made its comic book debut in the 1970's and has gone through several incarnations: a history that Brolin says allowed the film to be a bit more innovative and risky. "(It comes) from a comic book that has had three lives and wasn't necessarily successful, but I love the idea that it refused to die. So it was a 'survivalist' comic book, but it allowed us to take luxuries and do what we wanted to do as long as we had the blessing of the comic book artists. The core of the comic book character is there, but we kind of go off on all these different tangents," he says.