Directed by Jon Favreau. Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine 15A cert, gen release, 116 min
The last of the summer blockbusters is all killer cast and high concept, writes DONALD CLARKE
.I HEAR nobody asking what Jon Favreau’s latest is about. Based on a Platinum Studios comic, the picture does, indeed, concern itself with battles between inhabitants of the old west and visitors from beyond the stars. It’s sloppily told. It features off-the-peg aliens. The characters have about as much flesh on their bones as a boiled grasshopper. But the novelty of the high concept and the strength of the casting just about keep it ticking over. We might have expected worse from the last blockbuster of summer.
Events kick off with Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a lone gunman, awaking on a dusty prairie with a strange device attached to his arm. Confused and battered, Jake sensibly elects to do what lone gunmen do: he rides into town. You hardly need to be told that the settlement is not a haven of blissful peace and god-fearing civilisation. Jake has barely had time to swallow a glass of hooch before a wild young kid (Paul Dano) begins shooting up the villagers while hollering like a thick student on Arthur’s Day. Jake reluctantly helps detain the hothead, but there is a problem. He is the son of a powerful ranch owner (Harrison Ford) and feels himself beyond the law. The bigwig arrives and . . .
Oh, look, you’ve seen the poster and you’ve read the title, so you will be well aware that all this sub-Howard Hawks chatter is just the preamble to a visitation by the lizard men from Zafgar. While old-man Ford is arguing with Jake and the local lawmen, a veritable host of flying saucers arrives to nudge the piece into Spielbergian territory.
Before long a posse has been composed and, while bickering their way towards mutual understanding, the cowboys (and one cowgirl) set out to conquer an enemy more fearsome than a whole hillside of Apache.
To say that Cowboys & Aliensfails to replicate the real Wild West is to understate the case. The film doesn't even replicate the fake Wild West. We are sitting at half a dozen removes from that world as imagined by John Ford or Anthony Mann.
Featuring a cast of archetypes – loner, greenhorn, old warrior – each of whom has been filtered through several decades of reinvention, the film feels closer to Red Dead Redemption,the recent spiffing video game, than to the likes of My Darling Clementine.
At the other end of the three-word pitch, we encounter aliens that could have been constructed by a three-year-old with too much Plasticine and not enough imagination.
For all that, the film works well enough. Much of the credit must go the casting director who has found the right face for every boldly drawn stock character. Craig looks as if he’s recently been flung from a Chester flophouse, but, come to think of it, many cowboys probably did have just that sort of background. Sam Rockwell does a good Walter Softy – later to harden up – as the saloon owner whose dreams are silting over. Harrison Ford seems to do little else these days but appear REALLY ANGRY; so it’s just as well the elderly landowner finds so little with which to be content.
In truth, the film’s rampaging vulgarity is part of its rude charm. Anybody able to endure the outbreak of Flake-commercial eroticism – Craig and Olivia Wilde, playing a heavenly enigma, get wet in an upturned riverboat – without bursting into hoots of grateful laughter is in need of some serious lightening up.
Inevitably it all ends in a confusing, boring conflagration that has more to do with Alien Vs Predatorthan with Alien. Still, it's the best film with an ampersand in its title that you'll see this week.
