On paper, Cowboys And Aliens is a stupid an idea as any Hollywood has put out lately: cowboys fight aliens in the wild, wild, West. A roughly sewn together pastiche of genre seemingly aimed at quarterbacking on to the upward mobility of two classic genre trends. I scoffed at the Hollywood machine when I heard the property had been pushed towards the big screen. The genre film-going audience had been bombarded with mash-ups like this in the decade prior to the announcement (Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, etc.) and the idea of an adaptation of a comic book with such a brainless bent seemed just another regurgitation by the big men at the top of the film world. And then Jon Favreau signed up with Robert Downey Jr. in tow and the whole wide world of nerdom took a sharp breath. Favreau had reinvented the allure of the Marvel universe with Iron Man and his angular name plastered atop the marquee of a film as ludicrous as Cowboys And Aliens brought the hope of a possible sleeper classic. Of course, Downey Jr. dropped out, Daniel Craig stepped in, and the anticipation continued to grow. Even for this cynicism dripping critic, the film seemed a sure fire winner. Thus, the realization that Cowboys And Aliens is just another leaden summer blockbuster is not only a shock but a healthy jolt of sadness. But this is the realization I must share with you: the film is another lead-footed jaunt down a well-worn path, dragged in to a short-lived world of obscurity by poor casting and a solid leaning on the tropes of not only one genre, but two.
There isn’t
much to say about the storyline of Cowboys And Aliens:
a bunch of cowboys (lead by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford)
have to wrangle together a posse to save their people when a
group of flat-faced alien invaders crash in to Earth and
start with the kidnapping. Craig plays an ass-kicking ex-con
with a bit of alien strapped to his wrist and Ford plays a
curmudgeonly colonel with a heart of gold. Somewhere in the
mix Olivia Wilde looks uselessly hot and Sam Rockwell plays
a bartender looking to shoot guns and get his woman back
from the baddies. Even on paper it is fairly standard fare
but Favreau does almost nothing to avoid the trappings of
either delicate genre. The western aspects of the film are
shackled by convention - the squint-eyed colonel, the
mysterious woman, the drunken son, the sort of
teeth-clenching dialogue even Louie Lamour would’ve chortled
at - it’s all there and it all feels as stale as ever. Mesh
this with an alien invasion force so whittled down by budget
restraints and you have a film that nearly fails on all
levels.
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