The last time James Bond and Indiana Jones teamed up was in The Last Crusade. That was fun. In COWBOYS & ALIENS (M), the teaming isn’t as thrilling, entertaining, or witty.
COWBOYS & ALIENS is all hat and no cattle in a misconceived mish-mash of the Western and Science Fiction genres, that struts and frets its hour and forty-eight minutes upon the screen, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Daniel Craig, looking crap in a hat and trying to channel Clint Eastwood as a man with no memory except how to shoot and blue, who wakes up in the desert with a metal bracelet on his wrist. An early confrontation with some scalp hunters establishes his credentials as a gunslinger and fist fighter and he moseys into a town run by cattle baron Harrison Ford, who at least knows how to wear a hat.
Craig gets into a shemozzle with Harry’s son, Paul Dano, and both end up in the clink under order of Sheriff Keith Carradine. Seems Craig is a joker called Jake who has pinched a bunch of gold. It’s the precious metal that has attracted the Aliens of the title to our planet. And they plan to annihilate the population like intergalactic Goldfingers to get their slimy paws on the earth’s gold deposits.
These creatures bear a passing resemblance to Bud Westmore’s Creature from the Black Lagoon pumped on steroids which give them a buff cane toad appearance, especially as they leap and hop before they croak.
Harrison Ford certainly looks more comfortable in the saddle than he did at the news desk in last year’s execrable Morning Glory, and he does know how to wear a hat, but this role is no return to glory for the superstar action man of a quarter century ago. This ain’t no The Frisco Kid or Star Wars.
A posse of screenwriters has rustled up a script as appealing as last nights beans and just as flatulent and director John Favreau seems to have mined his action ore out with the Iron Man pictures.
The tone of the picture is much too brutal and violent for the younger viewers the narrative seems pitched to, going for an Unforgiven feel in what is quite clearly PG material. Consequently, the film has received an M classification. With all the gory glory, maybe executive producer Steven Spielberg should have demanded it be called Saving Private Property.
Daniel Craig gets his shirt off but keeps his chaps on, using his wrist bracelet, purloined from the interplanetary gold diggers, to hoist them on their own petard, while the Apaches are swindled yet again by receiving no acknowledgement in the title even though it is quite clear and abundantly apparent that without their help in combating the aliens the cowboys would have gone the way of Custer’s cavalry.
A rollicking western score by Harry Gregson-Williams is really the best thing about this poor popcorn cowpoke cowpat with its clunky script and tone deaf direction and excessive length – an 18 minute shave wouldn’t save it, but would help.
Richard Cotter
Wednesday 17th August, 2011