Cowboys & Aliens Review

James Bond, Indiana Jones, and the chick from House

Most likely to be the capper for the big-budget summer 2011 movie season, Cowboys & Aliens has been receiving an unfortunately mixed-to-negative reaction from critics, which calls into question their intelligence. Sure, it's no Inception, but with a title like COWBOYS AND FREAKIN' ALIENS, what the hell were they expecting? This movie delivers exactly what it promised: good, clean, sci-fi western mashup fun, with an all-star cast and crew bolstering it above the crapfests that preceded it like Jonah Hex and Wild Wild West. Not to fear, folks, this movie is devoid of all the things that made those movies suck, such as poor scripts, incoherent storytelling, giant mechanical spiders, and Megan Fox. Instead, we get Jon Favreau as director, bringing his good sense of fun over from the Iron Man films intact, and a decent script thrown together by Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, Star Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, and Iron Man scripters Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. And the odd part is, despite those writers' predominately science fiction backgrounds, the part of the film they nail the best is the western half. The film, until the arrival of the titular extraterrestrials, feels like a pure, honest-to-God western, with intense scenes involving Daniel Craig's Jake Lonergan fighting off attempted capturers, and a nice little scene where Paul Dano threatens to shoot up a street. It's also filled with gratuitous winks to the classics, with many a hat tipped to filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. The lead cowboys also give strong performances, with Craig feeling sort of like a new generation's Man with No Name, while Harrison Ford gives one of his best efforts in years as gruff Colonel Dolarhyde. The sci-fi half, on the other hand, isn't quite as expertly handled, though it still gets its licks. The aliens seem like a strange fusion of the recent Super 8 aliens with the Xenomorphs of old, while their technology is, at times, a little too reminiscent of its forefathers. Their reason for being here is also a bit of a cop out, but it works as a parallel to their nemeses in the context of the story. Olivia Wilde's character, Ella, ties the whole film together, and along with the outstanding supporting cast that includes the aforementioned Dano, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Noah Ringer, and Walton Goggins, they manage to make Cowboys & Aliens one of the most fun rides of the summer.

Cowboys & Aliens - 3.5/5 stars