Cowboys. Aliens. Two of the most cherished and awesome things in all of genre cinema. And what happens when we finally see them together on screen? A messy, barely competent, yawn-inducing bore-fest is born. The movie starts out promisingly enough; a silent-but-deadly Daniel Craig wakes up in the desert with a painful slash in his chest, a metal arm band/death beam shooter attached to his wrist, and no recollection of who he is and how he got there. After procedurally beating up some drifting thieves about to kill him, he sets foot in a small town to treat his wounds. In this town, Harrison Ford plays an iron-fisted colonel alongside many other notable actors including Paul Dano, the colonel’s immature son, Sam Rockwell, the pub owner, and Clancy Brown, the local priest. One night, aliens come down and start to raise heck, the townspeople must band together to fight back, and for two hours nothing inventive or interesting happens.
Although Craig’s stern mysteriousness, evoking the spirit of Clint Eastwood’s classic role in the “Dollars trilogy,” keeps the film interesting up to a point, there’s not much substance to the characters or the plot. The first half of the movie is an alright western, nothing special, and the second is the equivalent of watching a 14 year old play a bad video game. And even though all the “proper” western characters were present (gruff sheriff, “badass” cowboy, saloon-keep), none of their roles were memorable and there was not one person I truly cared about. Among the cast, the worst performance had to be Olivia Wilde, who as far as I’m concerned should stick to modeling. She doesn’t even look like she belongs in this picture because she’s nearly always perfectly clean and spotless – this is the Wild West we’re talking about here. Everyone else is covered in mud and shit, but she’s smiling away with Crest pearly whites and hair via Head and Shoulders.
Both sides of the respective cowboy and alien plots are given the bare-bones essentials and little else. Personally, I was hoping for an original, crazy take on the premise. The movie is painfully bland; although the special effects weren’t “bad,” they weren’t fresh or attractive either. The aliens (which were kept surprisingly secret in the trailers and ads) are basically big hulking idiots whose agenda for havoc is not clear at all. The movie tries to give a motivation for their destruction, but it comes off as odd and really doesn’t seem to make sense. The action scenes were OK at best and the finale did not have the proper “epic” sense of proportions a summer blockbuster needs (especially one called Cowboys & Aliens). All the action seemed really forced as well since the aliens clearly had the technology to completely blow the humans away (save for Daniel Craig and his arm-laser), but in order to make a fair fight, the writers had to basically come up with excuses as how to convincingly have the townspeople use their guns, spears, and lassos to kill the invading brutes.
Cowboys & Aliens may not be outright terrible, but with a premise as simple and promising as this, it’s a shame there was nothing “wicked awesome” to report back about. It’s good to see Harrison Ford not acting in a passive manner for once, and like I said before, Daniel Craig does have a decent intensity about him, but their characters alongside all the others are unlikable and have little personality. There’s an added waste of potential considering Lost co-show runner Damon Lindelof has a writing credit as well (to be fair, the guys behind Transformers and Eagle Eye were also on the writing team). Catching this film on TV or as a matinee time-waster I don’t think would be too offensive, but it’s still much more fun to think of what this film could have been than what it is.
Rating: C
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