Ratings
The Daily: 2/5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 44%
More on 'Cowboys & Aliens'
IMDB
Official website
What is it about Harrison Ford that compels screenwriters to rob him of his family? Much has been made of the shotgun genre-wedding represented by “Iron Man” director Jon Favreau’s new “Cowboys and Aliens.” But in casting Ford as a vengeful and bereft patriarch in search of a lost son, Favreau connects his film to another, perhaps equally venerable Hollywood tradition.
Let’s call it “Leave my family alone.” Ford has now uttered some gruff version of this line in an astonishing number of movies — “Air Force One,” “Firewall,” “Patriot Games,” even Roman Polanski’s terse noir “Frantic.” Just as the image of a solitary stranger riding slowly into a dusty town has long since been graven into the minds of filmgoers, so too is the sight of Ford karate-chopping, shooting, stabbing, choking, or otherwise ending the life of those who would threaten his kin.
In “Cowboys and Aliens,” Ford plays Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde, a cold-eyed Civil War veteran and cattle baron who has ineffective employees tied to horses and dragged off to points unknown. The local town, Absolution, is in economic thrall to Dolarhyde, and so finds itself duly terrorized by his whiny hipster cowboy son, Percy (Paul Dano). Until, that is, a man who cannot remember his name, his past or how he got the nifty new-age bracelet that encircles his left wrist comes to town, and knees a drunken Percy in the groin.
The man’s name, as he finds out when he is recognized from a wanted poster and placed in shackles, is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a much-feared bandit and thief. Lonergan and the elder Dolarhyde have crossed paths before, but before these two men can get to sorting out their debts, alien aircraft descend to strafe the town. Percy, along with half of the rest of Absolution’s residents, is sucked via cable into a spacecraft. And so it is time once more, in the well-worn Ford argot, to “get our people back.”
Not coincidentally, this is the plot (minus the extraterrestrials) of any number of Westerns that have preceded “Cowboys and Aliens,” chief among them John Ford’s “The Searchers,” in which the war veteran, this time in search of a vanished niece, is played in implacably racist fashion by John Wayne. “Cowboys and Aliens” could’ve been the name of that film too, for all the humanity Ford vests in the Comanches whom Wayne’s character so loves to kill.
So Favreau’s marriage of science fiction and the Western is less novel than it might seem. (What else was “Star Wars” but this same concept?) But “Cowboys and Aliens,” the carefully tested product of five different screenwriters and the power-producer trio of Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Steven Spielberg, does update the Western in other ways, stripping it of any nettlesome or fraught political and social valence, and instead positing an enemy too slimy, green and monstrous for anyone to mourn.
Favreau clearly has a sense of all the pieces that rightly belong here — he just can’t quite get them to fit together in any kind of satisfying way. There is the striking Olivia Wilde — looking like a modern-day woman from Los Angeles stuffed incongruously into a pioneer dress and cowboy hat — in a supporting role as a woman with a secret and an unexplained interest in Lonergan. The underappreciated Sam Rockwell has a jittery turn as a bar-owner geek who watches helplessly as the aliens take his wife. And the squabbling pack that eventually sets out from Absolution in search of an explanation and revenge comes complete with a wise preacher (Clancy Brown), a young boy (Noah Ringer) and Dolarhyde’s loyal but scorned Indian manservant, Nat Colorado (Adam Beach).
Archetypes and demographics thus pandered to and satisfied, Favreau gives in to the pleasures of the genre — sporadic, Universal Studios Florida-ready battles with the aliens; more bandits, who waylay Lonergan and Dolarhyde’s crew; and yes, Indians, who start savage but quickly turn friendly.
Soon Lonergan is off recovering his memory and bonding with a particularly nifty hummingbird spirit animal under the influence of a hallucinogenic concoction and the sweet, sweet sounds of Apache drumming. The thing on his wrist, we learn, is an alien technology and pretty much the only thing the foreigners are susceptible to; he got it in a not-so-distant past life from the invaders’ mothership, which is conveniently docked in a nearby part of the New Mexico Territory. (There is a New Age parable here, somewhere.) What happens next we will not spoil, except to say that Harrison Ford, nearly 30 years after storming a shield generator on the forest moon of Endor, can still get past seemingly impenetrable defenses with the best of them.
So why does “Cowboys and Aliens” feel so boringly inert? In part, it’s a movie, adapted from a comic book, with a head full of other movies — not just “The Searchers” and “Star Wars,” but also “Stagecoach,” “Rio Bravo” and the collected films of Steven Spielberg — starring two men who can’t help but riff on their own onscreen history.
Craig, repudiating the James Bond role for which he’s famous, plays Lonergan straight, impassive and nearly mute; he is a cipher in want of a characterization beyond “not-Bond.” And Ford, whether he’s searching for lost family, refusing to wear a wide-brimmed hat in memory of Indiana Jones, or marshalling overmatched forces with that commanding Han Solo voice, cannot quite pretend that any of this is happening for the first time. Neither, alas, can Favreau, who gives us a theme park ride instead of a movie — those old familiar dips and dives, spaced out at soothing intervals, without a single real surprise from start to finish.
The Daily: 2/5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 44%
More on 'Cowboys & Aliens'
IMDB
Official website
What is it about Harrison Ford that compels screenwriters to rob him of his family? Much has been made of the shotgun genre-wedding represented by “Iron Man” director Jon Favreau’s new “Cowboys and Aliens.” But in casting Ford as a vengeful and bereft patriarch in search of a lost son, Favreau connects his film to another, perhaps equally venerable Hollywood tradition.
Let’s call it “Leave my family alone.” Ford has now uttered some gruff version of this line in an astonishing number of movies — “Air Force One,” “Firewall,” “Patriot Games,” even Roman Polanski’s terse noir “Frantic.” Just as the image of a solitary stranger riding slowly into a dusty town has long since been graven into the minds of filmgoers, so too is the sight of Ford karate-chopping, shooting, stabbing, choking, or otherwise ending the life of those who would threaten his kin.
In “Cowboys and Aliens,” Ford plays Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde, a cold-eyed Civil War veteran and cattle baron who has ineffective employees tied to horses and dragged off to points unknown. The local town, Absolution, is in economic thrall to Dolarhyde, and so finds itself duly terrorized by his whiny hipster cowboy son, Percy (Paul Dano). Until, that is, a man who cannot remember his name, his past or how he got the nifty new-age bracelet that encircles his left wrist comes to town, and knees a drunken Percy in the groin.
The man’s name, as he finds out when he is recognized from a wanted poster and placed in shackles, is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a much-feared bandit and thief. Lonergan and the elder Dolarhyde have crossed paths before, but before these two men can get to sorting out their debts, alien aircraft descend to strafe the town. Percy, along with half of the rest of Absolution’s residents, is sucked via cable into a spacecraft. And so it is time once more, in the well-worn Ford argot, to “get our people back.”
Not coincidentally, this is the plot (minus the extraterrestrials) of any number of Westerns that have preceded “Cowboys and Aliens,” chief among them John Ford’s “The Searchers,” in which the war veteran, this time in search of a vanished niece, is played in implacably racist fashion by John Wayne. “Cowboys and Aliens” could’ve been the name of that film too, for all the humanity Ford vests in the Comanches whom Wayne’s character so loves to kill.
So Favreau’s marriage of science fiction and the Western is less novel than it might seem. (What else was “Star Wars” but this same concept?) But “Cowboys and Aliens,” the carefully tested product of five different screenwriters and the power-producer trio of Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Steven Spielberg, does update the Western in other ways, stripping it of any nettlesome or fraught political and social valence, and instead positing an enemy too slimy, green and monstrous for anyone to mourn.
Favreau clearly has a sense of all the pieces that rightly belong here — he just can’t quite get them to fit together in any kind of satisfying way. There is the striking Olivia Wilde — looking like a modern-day woman from Los Angeles stuffed incongruously into a pioneer dress and cowboy hat — in a supporting role as a woman with a secret and an unexplained interest in Lonergan. The underappreciated Sam Rockwell has a jittery turn as a bar-owner geek who watches helplessly as the aliens take his wife. And the squabbling pack that eventually sets out from Absolution in search of an explanation and revenge comes complete with a wise preacher (Clancy Brown), a young boy (Noah Ringer) and Dolarhyde’s loyal but scorned Indian manservant, Nat Colorado (Adam Beach).
Archetypes and demographics thus pandered to and satisfied, Favreau gives in to the pleasures of the genre — sporadic, Universal Studios Florida-ready battles with the aliens; more bandits, who waylay Lonergan and Dolarhyde’s crew; and yes, Indians, who start savage but quickly turn friendly.
Soon Lonergan is off recovering his memory and bonding with a particularly nifty hummingbird spirit animal under the influence of a hallucinogenic concoction and the sweet, sweet sounds of Apache drumming. The thing on his wrist, we learn, is an alien technology and pretty much the only thing the foreigners are susceptible to; he got it in a not-so-distant past life from the invaders’ mothership, which is conveniently docked in a nearby part of the New Mexico Territory. (There is a New Age parable here, somewhere.) What happens next we will not spoil, except to say that Harrison Ford, nearly 30 years after storming a shield generator on the forest moon of Endor, can still get past seemingly impenetrable defenses with the best of them.
So why does “Cowboys and Aliens” feel so boringly inert? In part, it’s a movie, adapted from a comic book, with a head full of other movies — not just “The Searchers” and “Star Wars,” but also “Stagecoach,” “Rio Bravo” and the collected films of Steven Spielberg — starring two men who can’t help but riff on their own onscreen history.
Craig, repudiating the James Bond role for which he’s famous, plays Lonergan straight, impassive and nearly mute; he is a cipher in want of a characterization beyond “not-Bond.” And Ford, whether he’s searching for lost family, refusing to wear a wide-brimmed hat in memory of Indiana Jones, or marshalling overmatched forces with that commanding Han Solo voice, cannot quite pretend that any of this is happening for the first time. Neither, alas, can Favreau, who gives us a theme park ride instead of a movie — those old familiar dips and dives, spaced out at soothing intervals, without a single real surprise from start to finish.
