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Luckily for humankind, it turns out that Craig — who has a terrible headache and can’t remember a thing — is actually an escapee from the aliens’ prison-cum-laboratory, and has managed to procure a glowing bracelet that doubles as a supergun. Thus we are launched into a film that never risks confusing its audience by straying too far from the crushingly literal title. In short: warring humans of the Wild West must come together as one species to boot these no-good darn space monsters wit’ dem fancy rocketships back to the dimension from whence they came. The remaining details don’t particularly matter, because none of them stands up to even the most fleeting scrutiny. But, frankly, who cares? After all, this loathsome summer of 2011 is in dire need of some silliness. And in spite of its flaws, Cowboys & Aliens is a thoroughly entertaining two hours of codswallop.
Be warned, though: there are flaws aplenty. It is surely high time, for example, that Hollywood moves on from alien technology that resembles the output of Frank Lloyd Wright during his Mayan Revival period. The same goes for creatures with faces made entirely from nasal cartilage. To be fair, however, there are some inventive touches in Cowboys & Aliens, including spacecraft that abduct their one-toothed victims using lassoes rather than teleportation devices. But originality isn’t the point of this venture (for incongruously advanced technology in a spit’n’sawdust setting, see Wild Wild West and Back to the Future III; for everything else see Independence Day). No, what makes Cowboys & Aliens a watchable indulgence is a taut screenplay (eight writers are credited, under the direction of Jon Favreau) and two muscular, sweaty performances from Craig and Harrison Ford.
In fact, Craig is so good, I suspect the Bond franchise will prove to be the launch of his action career rather than the height of it. He doesn’t quite get a ‘moment’ — i.e., Will Smith hauling an alien out of its craft in Independence Day and punching it in the face — but he comes close. Likewise, Ford’s turn as wealthy, sinister cattle rancher with an overly petulant son is almost enough to banish the horror of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (in which he survived a nuclear explosion by hiding in a fridge, thus inspiring the term to ‘nuke the fridge’, meaning to destroy a franchise with one ill-judged sequel).
Sadly, the rest of the cast doesn’t fare so well, and indeed many of the supporting actors appear to have been sourced from popular US television shows (‘Thirteen’ from House; Agent Lundy from Dexter; Shane from The Shield). Of all these, Olivia Wilde (‘Thirteen’) is the most disappointingly awful — to the point where her scenes as a mysterious, gun-slinging siren become essentially comic. The director and writers have to share a good deal of the blame for this, as they must for the film’s acid-tripping Native American warriors, who would seem laughably mono-dimensional even in a daytime soap. (Their battle cry is also ludicrous, sounding identical to the soundtrack of the number one app Angry Birds.) All of which raises the question, I suppose: can we really forgive a film such errors? In any other year, perhaps not. As it is, if you’re in need of some other-worldly distraction — and who isn’t? — this does the job more than well enough.
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