You've got James Bond and Indiana Jones fighting monsters from outer space in the Old West! What could possibly go wrong? In Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens, it's not so much what goes wrong as what doesn't go right.
The setup is fine. A man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the New Mexico outback with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Or why a strange metal bracelet is locked around his wrist. When confronted by a mean gang of three men on horseback, he quickly kills them with his fists and legs.
So far, so Bourne.
He mounts a horse and rides into an archetypically dusty small town, where he encounters a mean bully named Percy (Paul Dano) and quickly kicks him in the crotch when Percy demands the stranger make a "contribution." Trying to retaliate, Percy ineptly kills one of the town's deputy sheriffs, provoking the ire of the Sheriff (Keith Carradine) and prompt incarceration. After the stranger is identified by a "Wanted" poster as mean outlaw Jake Longergan, he joins Percy in jail, but not before a brief encounter with the beautiful Ella Swanson (Olivia Wilde), who claims to know something about him.
Percy is the spoiled son of mean cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), who is so mean that he threatens to (literally) rip a cowpoke in two if he doesn't come up with a better story for missing cattle than "big lights came and took them." Woodrow rides into town with his men to break Percy out of jail, arriving just in time for an attack by alien spacecraft and the simultaneous activation of the strange metal bracelet on Jake's wrist. The bracelet is a powerful weapon, but it's not enough to keep the aliens from capturing Percy, the Sheriff, and others by lassoing them with wicked metal harnesses, whipping them up into the stratosphere and, it would seem, certain death and/or hideous alien examination.
The lasso kidnapping scene is a great burst of dynamite, energizing what had been, up to that point, a fairly mild-tempered, routine affair. Jake is the epitome of a taciturn Western hero, which is fine, but he's surrounded by Western characters who act exactly as you would expect them to act, not only the wise, benevolent Sheriff, but also Meacham (Clancy Brown), a preacher who's remarkably open-minded, as well as a bartender / medical doctor named, surprisingly, Doc (Sam Rockwell).
The stockpile of stereotypes rises higher with a wise and discreet Native American (Adam Beach), a loyal underling to Woodrow who treats the older man as his father, and a sad little boy (Noah Ringer) who helps soften up the cattle baron. Woodrow sounds genuinely mean at first, and I had a glimmer of hope that Harrison Ford might actually be playing a bad guy, but that was foolish thinking on my part. It's Harrison Ford! So Woodrow proves to be a gruff, misunderstood soul who lashes out discipline for the good of others. (We can imagine a deleted scene where he says, "This hurts me more than it hurts you.") See, he only pretends to be mean.
Daniel Craig has a convincing-enough American accent, and it's no trouble believing he's a badass lost in the desert who stumbles upon a movie set and plays along while he hides out from the law. But then that would be stealing from Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, and then Cowboys & Aliens might be a better movie.
It's not that Cowboys & Aliens is bad, per se, just that it pokes along rather than galloping. It wants to be a Western, but it's a horse opera that relies upon the novelty of an alien invasion to perk up the plot, which dawdles when it needs to dash. There's no real emotional bite to the loss of all the townspeople who got roped by riders in the sky; it's just a device to herd the story along to its inevitable final battle. To add insult to injury, Olivia Wilde isn't even naked (that we can see)! Unless your eye is quicker than mine and/or you can freeze frame a theatrical presentation.
When Jon Favreau was announced as the director of this movie in September 2009, I fully expected (and hoped) that he might be able to recapture the magic in a bottle that was Iron Man, the peak of his career to that point. But that was before Iron Man 2 and the sour disappointment of a flaccid sequel. I wanted a knockout punch, and Cowboys & Aliens delivers no more thrills than a weak superhero sequel. And that's nearly not good enough, even for a picture that fairly screams "I'm only popcorn entertainment."
Cowboys & Aliens open wide today in the U.S. Check local listings for theaters and showtimes.