COWBOYS AND ALIENS MOVIE
In the end, “C&A” is a movie for a Saturday night rather than one for the ages. Wilde isn’t handed many acting challenges but looks fetching in calico and scrambles up and down cliffs nimbly. Ford, playing a bossy old cuss, has the most fun of anyone, maybe because he knows he’s no longer responsible for carrying a franchise on his shoulders. He’s not as suave here as he is when portraying James Bond, but he’s admirably stoic and, given the chance, wrings laughs where possible. (This despite five credited screenwriters, two of whom along with a third devised the screen story, which they in turn adapted from a 2006 graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.)Īs for the cast, Craig does just fine as a strong silent type. Everything simply lurches forward in episodic fashion, with cowboys going after aliens being pretty much the sum total of the movie’s plot.
The sci-fi half of the film is disappointingly ho-hum and familiar, drawing on “Alien,” “Independence Day” and a score of other films from the past couple decades.Ĭharacters are so sketchily drawn that little is really at stake here. “C&A” is most effective and amusing when it is plumbing the clichés of cowboy movies and goosing them, as in when Jake, galloping on horseback, attempts to outrace an alien plane. By daybreak, Jake and the Colonel are leading a posse on horseback in pursuit of the aliens. Even worse, the craft are swooping down with long metal cables, hooking folk and lifting them skyward. Dolarhyde (Ford), a wealthy cattleman who rules the town Ella ( Olivia Wilde), a mysterious young woman with a keen interest in Jake the local sheriff (Keith Carradine) an assimilated Native American (Adam Beach) and the saloon keeper (Sam Rockwell).įaster than you can load a Winchester rifle, alien spacecraft - this is 1875, remember, so actually any spacecraft would be alien - are strafing Absolution. Both he and we discover this when he heads into the nearby town of Absolution (get it?), where he comes up against Col. Turns out, he’s Jake Lonergan, and he’s a wanted man. Never mind the extraterrestrials and cowpokes it’s as if the movie itself has been lassoed.He cannot, try though he might, remember who he is, what happened or how he got there. Throughout, frivolity is shunned in favor of a stern demeanor. When Craig’s gunslinger leaps from his horse onto a low-flying spacecraft, the movie depicts it with a macho matter-of-factness rather than embracing the exhilarating ludicrousness of such an act. Indeed, much of Cowboys & Aliens plays as if it’s being held in check. Meanwhile, Favreau – whose Iron Man was loose, light-hearted and witty – jettisons that tone and goes out of his way to downplay scenes that are ripe for good-natured laughs. Harrison Ford – who managed a jaunty demeanor throughout the Indiana Jones films – sounded like perfect casting, until you realize he’s been given an extraneous part as a grouchy cattle baron. The right people were in place to pull this off. With its sublimely ridiculous premise, however, Cowboys & Aliens’ true calling was to be a rollicking, audience-rousing action comedy, less a mashup of Predator and Unforgiven than a mashup of Shanghai Noon and Men in Black.
As a fan of Westerns, I was perfectly happy with Cowboys & Aliens, at least until the aliens showed up.
He even manages to wring tension out of a familiar saloon showdown. With his naturally hunted demeanor, Craig has the desperado drifter look down. The first 20 minutes – featuring Craig as a wounded tough guy with amnesia who walks into a desert town – are the most engaging in the film. It really depends on whether or not you give the movie extra points simply because the guys pointing guns this time are wearing cowboy hats.īecause Cowboys & Aliens never really grabs you – because it lacks the straight-up intensity of, say, Aliens – your mind starts to wander, mulling the other, better films it could have been.Īn old-fashioned Western is one of these. Director Jon Favreau and his team of screenwriters based Cowboys & Aliens on a 2006 graphic novel and he’s been clear in interviews that it was always intended to be a straight-faced action mashup. I suppose it’s not fair to criticize a picture for failing at something it never meant to achieve. It’s a bit like the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator, but without the laughs. The movie is mostly interested in monster effects, abduction victims and the angst-ridden redemption of its outlaw-turned-hero (Daniel Craig). Call me silly, but I thought a movie titled Cowboys & Aliens might be fun.įor a film that features extraterrestrials lassoing cowpokes (and vice versa), Cowboys & Aliens is a surprisingly grim, clenched-jaw experience.
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