Cowboys & Aliens

Based on a comic book, Cowboys & Aliens details the chaos that ensues after otherworldly creatures launch a vicious attack against the residents of an Old West community – with the film subsequently following several characters as they embark on a journey to find (and destroy) the aliens’ subterranean base. There’s little doubt that Cowboys & Aliens fares best in its opening half hour, as filmmaker Jon Favreau has assembled an impressively off-kilter cast and thrown them into what is essentially a prototypical Western. The affably familiar atmosphere, which is certainly perpetuated by the inclusion of genre staples like the saloon shootout and the mysterious gunfighter who rolls into town, persists right up until the bloodthirsty aliens arrive on the scene, after which point the survivors, including Daniel Craig’s Jake, Harrison Ford’s Woodrow, and Olivia Wilde’s Ella, head out on their aforementioned expedition into the desert – with the decidedly unfocused nature of this stretch effectively wreaking havoc on the film’s momentum. The pervasively erratic atmosphere ensures that Cowboys & Aliens‘ midsection ultimately feels padded out to an almost unreasonable degree, as Favreau and his five screenwriters emphasize the less-than-engrossing episodic exploits of the film’s somewhat underdeveloped characters (eg the group encounters an upside-down steamboat, Jake meets up with his former gang, etc, etc). The likeable performances are, as a result, rendered moot in the build-up to the movie’s larger-than-life climax (which, as it involves a lot of running and shooting and blowing things up, seems to have been designed to appeal solely to teenage boys), with the progressively dumbed-down atmosphere finally cementing Cowboys & Aliens‘ place as a distressingly underwhelming summer blockbuster.

** out of ****