Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) sets out to combine genres with Cowboys & Aliens, a sci-fi/Western based on a graphic novel. Taking place in a small town in the wild, wild West, the film commences with a scene in which Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up to find a bracelet strapped to his arm. He quickly dispenses with a few roughneck cowboys who try to take him out, and he ends up in the town of Absolution, where he has a run-in with Percy (Paul Dano), the trouble-making son of rich cattleman Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). When Dolarhyde comes to rescue his son, the alien invasion begins and his son along with a group of townspeople are captured and whisked off to a giant spaceship that has attached itself to the base of a mountain. Jake’s bracelet, it turns out, is the key to defeating the aliens. It possesses the ability to destroy their entire colony, but Jake has to get close enough to the bad guys to make that happen. Jake and the Colonel realize they must put aside their differences and organize a posse to defeat the evil aliens. It’s at this point that that the plot begins to slow. The film will undoubtedly appeal to anyone who loves Westerns. Ford and Craig both make for good grizzled cowboys (Olivia Wilde, however, is miscast as Jake’s love interest). But once the aliens arrive, all the nuances disappear and the movie turns into a video game of sorts as heavily armed cowboys and aliens engage in one long, dull shootout.
-Jeff Niesel