Review: ‘Cowboys & Aliens’
Rarely is a movie's hook spelled out as succinctly and tantalizingly in its title as with "Cowboys & Aliens." It's such a fun concept, in fact, that when the actual movie was over I felt weirdly shortchanged. There are indeed cowboys in the film, as are there aliens. But the enjoyable mash-up of worlds and genres that the title suggests never really happens. Turns out it isn't those two words that matter most: It's the ampersand that links them together.
Directed by Jon Favreau, who graduated from "Elf" to major action filmmaker with the Iron Man movies, "Cowboys & Aliens" is based on a graphic novel that, from all accounts, was gutted on its way to the screen. The title remains, but not much else. Now we have a drifter (Daniel Craig) who awakes to find himself in the middle of the American Southwest in the late 19th century. He doesn't know how he got there, and he doesn't know his name. But once he makes his way to a nearby small town, he comes to discover that he's Jake Lonergan, a wanted murderer. But before the residents, including Harrison Ford's cranky old Woodrow Dolarhyde, can do much about that, they're attacked by alien ships, which scoop up some of the population and whisk them away.
The early stretches of "Cowboys & Aliens" are the strongest because of how Favreau sets up his Old West surroundings. Without consciously trying to evoke any particular Western, he nonetheless captures the genre's bone-dry, measured pace and tone. Amidst a particularly frantic summer movie season, the first half hour of "Cowboys & Aliens" is almost willfully slow and relaxed, letting us get a sense of these characters, which include Olivia Wilde's mysterious beauty who knows Lonergan's past and Sam Rockwell's pacifist saloon owner. That gradual buildup is important so that the surprise of the first alien strike can be all the more effective and startling.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the movie (which has five credited screenwriters and an additional screen story writer) is devoted to the townspeople's journey to hunt down these aliens. It's a Western tradition for the posse to go after the bad guys, but posses need characters and nobody really pops in "Cowboys & Aliens." While Craig has made a fearsome James Bond, he often runs the risk of being humorless, and Lonergan is particularly wooden, no matter how good he looks in a hat. It makes sense for Craig to adopt an American accent for the role, but the strategy ends up flattening him out, undercutting the wry sarcasm he normally brings to bear. Likewise, while Ford shows some spark as the ornery, dangerous Dolarhyde, the faded star simply doesn't have much to do. There's no real attempt to build any sort of rapport between him and Craig. They're each their own entity, and you can almost sense the filmmakers trying to ensure that both get enough screen time.
As for the aliens, they're as drab as the cowboys -- and just as one-note. Once Favreau starts us off with a leisurely pace at the beginning, he quickly ratchets up the tension and action, but the extra-terrestrials aren't particularly exciting. Mostly, they're just mean, killing and torturing everything in sight, although since they have no real personality they never really feel suitably horrifying. Because of the novelty of the concept, the very presence of aliens in an Old West setting, in which they'd be clearly technologically superior to their human counterparts, should make for a refreshing take on sci-fi conventions. But "Cowboys & Aliens" essentially recycles the Ewoks-vs.-Stormtroopers finale of "Return of the Jedi," pausing just long enough for a rather hokey emotional resolution between Dolarhyde and Adam Beach's loyal Native American sidekick.
Throughout "Cowboys & Aliens," it's impossible to shake the feeling that, really, this all should be a lot more fun than it is. Even the film's tenor is off, growing progressively darker without having the engaging characters or gripping action sequences to make that tonal shift really work. A jokey genre mash-up would have been disastrous, but after the light touch Favreau showed with "Iron Man," where he was able to balance comic book pleasures with dramatic underpinnings, "Cowboys & Aliens" just lumbers along. You walk out of the movie thinking the same thing you did when you walked in: Boy, "Cowboys & Aliens" sure would make a good concept for a film.
Grade: C
