In “Cowboys & Aliens,” Daniel Craig wakes up in the desert bruised, bloodied and wearing a strange bracelet that he soon discovers is an alien weapon. Later, he learns he can control the weapon by clearing his mind and not thinking. Your enjoyment of “Cowboys & Aliens” is predicated on that same ability. Think too long and hard about the film and it goes from a passable, mediocre bit of summer entertainment to an embarrassing exercise from a group of professionals who should have known better. But maybe we all should have known better.
The simple premise seemed ripe with raucous possibilities for blockbuster season. It’s helmed by Jon Favreau and stars Craig, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, and a stable of great character actors. What could go wrong?
Almost everything, as it turns out. But most glaringly: the movie’s five credited screenwriters squander the premise, Favreau loses the swagger he brought to the “Iron Man” films, and each cast member seems to think he’s in some other movie about cowboys and aliens—a comedy, maybe, or some kind of ironic western.
Craig, at least, is pretty clear on his role. He’s Lonergan, a hard-drinking, ass-kicking gunslinger who’s got no memory of how he ended up in the desert wearing some weird jewelry and sporting a bad wound in the gut. Lonergan makes it back to town, gets sewn up by the preacher and, in short order, lands himself in jail on charges of robbing a stagecoach. The gold he allegedly stole belonged to Dolarhyde (Ford), the big-shot cattle rancher who runs the town and who is determined to see Lonergan hanged for his crime.
But then the aliens show up in some jets that look sort of like dragonflies. They strafe the town, blow up some buildings, and snatch up a bunch of townsfolk, including Dolarhyde’s no-good son (Paul Dano) and the wife of the local saloon keeper (Rockwell). Lonergan’s bracelet comes to life and starts zapping alien ships, the remaining townsfolk form a ragtag posse, and the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde) tries to help Lonergan recover his memory and commit to kicking alien ass.
Favreau keeps things chugging along, but it’s so predictable that there are no surprises and little fun. The screenwriters, including genre vets Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, mash together western clichés with alien invasion clichés instead of having fun with the material. A brief stop at a riverboat casino the aliens have dropped in the middle of the desert is promising but never amounts to much. And some sequences are downright laughable, such as when Lonergan undergoes a mid-movie vision quest with the help of some Apache and his spirit animal, a hummingbird.
Nothing fits together here. Is “Cowboys & Aliens” a lighthearted sci-fi action flick? Is it a serious-but-dumb blockbuster? Is it an ironic tweak on genre conventions?
It seems to depend on who’s on-screen at the moment. Craig is grim and confident, but with a touch of humor—a perfect performance for a brainless mid-summer blockbuster. But Ford seems grumpy and vaguely embarrassed about his lines. Dano and Rockwell, meanwhile, tailor their performances for an ironic western comedy that might or might not involve aliens. Favreau doesn’t even seem to know what sort of movie he’s making, and the cool confidence he lent to “Iron Man” and its sequel are totally absent.
The problem may start with the source material itself. “Cowboys & Aliens” originated all the way back in 1997, when Scott Mitchell Rosenberg pitched the movie based on a one-sheet poster of a cowboy fleeing from a UFO. That pitch became a graphic novel in 2006.
“Cowboys & Aliens” is a movie based on a comic based on a poster, which wouldn’t be so bad if the film ever moved beyond its own premise. But it doesn’t, and the crazy thrills promised by the idea of cowboys slugging it out with aliens never materialize. Rosenberg should have stuck with the poster and left it at that.
