Cowboys and Aliens (2011)

Directed by: Jon Favreau
Starring: Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, Abigail Spencer

When I first saw the preview for Cowboys and Aliens, it was in a packed theater for the weekend showing of Harry Potter. The audience roared with laughter when the spaceship appeared over the quaint and desolate western town. Secretly I thought to myself...”Cowboys AND aliens? YES!” but on the outside I joined in the raucous laughter anyways. “Cowboys AND aliens? How ridiculous ha ha!”......

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing ridiculous about cowboys and aliens being in the same film together. What’s so weird about cowboys meeting with aliens? Perfectly logical in my mind, if you are thinking that aliens have probably been around far longer than humans have, so why wouldn’t they have come to earth sooner than 1996? Right because it’s much more believable if aliens make an appearance when people are accustomed to them or if Will Smith is present. I forgot. In any case, the one thing that Cowboys and Aliens has going against it, is that people will have a hard time taking it seriously as a film and not a farce. What they should be doing however is taking it seriously as just a fun, action packed movie starring some really hot people. What's not to love again?

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) awakens in the middle of the desert unaware of who he is or how he got there. Attached to his wrist is a heavy metal bracelet that he cannot remove and a mysterious gaping wound on his side. Once arriving in the nearby town, Jake discovers that he is a criminal wanted for murder, mayhem and robbery and is arrested on the spot. While en route to his life sentencing and death, alien spaceships suddenly attack the town, stealing people off the streets with strange flying harness contraptions. It is at this moment that Jake's bracelet suddenly begins to react. With it, he is able to bring the spaceships down and gain the trust and awe of the townspeople. Embarking on a journey to reclaim his memory and the lives of the people who were stolen, Jake leads a posse off in search of the creatures and in search of the man he used to be.

What works well in Cowboys and Aliens is that both sides of the spectrum are evenly represented. The western portion is gritty, entertaining and raw. The Sci-Fi portion is fast paced, entertaining and even scary at times. Somehow and against most odds, the two come together and end up creating a very interesting balance that in most cases works. Some people will understandably not know how to deal with this mix-up, while others will find it delightful and in a kind of best of both worlds territory.

The film is also humorous and contains some truly entertaining moments and great lines. But then also some not as well timed or planned out ones---and most of all, a few possibly unintentional laughs. Although most of the time, these seemed to come from people that have probably never seen an actual western film before. Yes---at one point in time Westerns WERE really like that! People talked in short gruff sentences--deal with it kids.

The film's greatest achievement however is that it creates some truly likable characters. The kind of people that receive applause from the audience when they do something great and the kind of people that we love. Sam Rockwell's character Doc is perhaps the best example of this. A man who has never shot a gun before but is determined all the same to reclaim his wife from the clutches of the aliens. Also a stand out is the young boy, Emmett played by Noah Ringer. A young boy who comes along to reclaim his grandfather and the town's sheriff (Keith Carradine) and who, thanks to Woodrow Dolarhyde's (Harrison Ford) tough exterior, becomes a real man by the film's conclusion. Harrison Ford plays the psuedo villain well here, unloading some real aggression yet still manages to win us over by the end.

But what about Daniel Craig? Alright, alright at times... or all of the time rather, Daniel Craig does mostly feel like James Bond but with a cowboy hat on. He possesses that same level of refined confidence and that strange superpower to magically kick anyones ass as he does when he becomes 007. Luckily for him, this is a character that is always going to work in just about any situation he is in. It also doesn't hurt that he's so fucking hot that it wildly distracts me every time he's on the screen. His acting? Oh right that.....yeah well, it's good.

I do a feel a bit of disappointment surrounding Olivia Wilde’s character as she is predictable and after a certain point, ridiculous. But she does a fine job of not bowing to the likes of our standard female characters in super hero/action-y flicks. I will say it was probably very hard for her to take in the fact that she was not going to be the hottest person in the film. Although there was one point where I thought there was going to be a battle for who had the brightest and bluest eyes (Daniel Craig won).

Our alien bad guys are interestingly designed, looking like really mean frogs with secret hidden fetus hands inside of their chests. Most of the time they ended up being pretty cool looking, save for a few moments where their CGI started showing in the bright white beam of their spaceship. They do however provide some decent moments of gore, surprise and fear though and are just crazy enough to not only shock our cowboys but to shock us as well.

What I could do without in the film however, are a few select moments of grade A cheese, including but not limited to Olivia Wilde emerging from a fire naked, Daniel Craig hallucinating (?) a hummingbird that makes him smile like a gleeful little boy, and Harrison Ford unloading his final bit of helpful advice to our hero at the film’s conclusion. These were the moments where the audience chuckled in that, "Oh god" kind of way and it was hard to tell in these instances if they were supposed to be serious moments or not. The film also verges on some heavy ridiculousness---but it's the good kind of ridiculous. The kind where our hero jumps off a cliff onto a fast moving spaceship to save the girl from the aliens--and it's fine. Although I will say I had a little trouble believing that the Indians could kill the aliens just by clobbering them on the head with their sticks. These kind of things however are able to be shrugged off. Especially once you remind yourself that the true dominating genre is action. We aren't going into Cowboys and Aliens expecting Oscar nominations and wide critical acclaim. We expect entertainment and a good time and thankfully that is what we get.

Naturally what a lot of people will oppose is the overtly rosy disposition that the film gives off. Racism? Pish posh! Indians and white men are friends! God! Family! Women stink! But in reality these moments are small in comparison to what we are really supposed to be taking away from the film--a good time. When it comes down to it, Cowboys and Aliens is simply just a fun and entertaining film. It runs a little longer than it should, but when all is said and done it does accomplish what it ultimately sets out to do---entertain the masses and maybe even surprise them a bit. It is in fact the perfect way to spend a warm summer evening, in a cool dark theater, watching cowboys kick some alien ass. Oh and the dog survives. What more could we really hope for?

This is a Day Two Review.

Rating: (4 out of 5):