Anticipation.
Indy-pendence Day.
Enjoyment.
Dances With Wookies.
In Retrospect.
Tonto Recall.
Despite boasting one of the year’s best taglines – ‘First Contact. Last Stand’ is a rare stroke of marketing genius – Cowboys & Aliens is yet another underwhelming summer brouhaha that fails to up the ante.
With the mash-up premise derived from the 2006 Platinum Studios graphic novel of the same name, director Jon Favreau applies the blockbuster finish in typically brawny fashion. Sadly, however, the perma-goateed Iron Man steed has also chosen the low road by extracting the most banal and well-worn components from both parent genres, resulting in an intergalactic gunslinger that could have played out like Blade Runner meets The Searchers but ended up Wild Wild West with bugs.
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We open in Absolution, a single-track Arizona fleapit that’s bossed by a surly cattle rancher-cum-colonel named Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). With the townsfolk under his thumb, Dolarhyde’s snot-nosed son (Paul Dano) is free to pistol-whip and pillage at his leisure. That is, until a stranger with a murky past moseys on into view.
He’s Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), an curiously metrosexual sunuvabitch with a chip on his shoulder and a mysterious brace locked tight around his wrist. After trouble flares in the local saloon, Lonergan and Dolarhyde go mano y mano before a exoteric glitch flips the film’s equilibrium on its Stetson.
After the dust from this exhilarating first encounter settles our quarrelling protagonists puts their difference aside, wrangle up a posse and set out across the vast Midwest to track down the outer space intruders, who’ve abducted half the town. This middle-third is paced well, but we’re always more interested in the climactic Mexican stand off than any half-baked character toning that precedes it.
So what does Cowboys & Aliens tell us that we didn’t already know? Ultimately, not a lot.
Ford should have hung up his acting spurs years ago. Favreau is a safe pair of hands with a multi-million dollar budget, but his directing legacy still doesn’t extend much further than Will Ferrell dicking around in yellow pantyhose. Craig is a bona fide action star who shouldn’t be reduced to spitting out lines like “Demons took your gold” in a husky Southern drawl. And Hollywood’s Midas touch is still stuck in reverse.
