Cowboys & Aliens

When cooking, do you ever take two ingredients and combine them even though it will create a bizzare combination that most certainly won't work? Well, Jon Favreau (who directed the amazing Iron Man) feels your pain with his latest work; Cowboys & Aliens, a bizzare disaster of a movie that tries to combine a western story and a scifi flick while not really succeeding at either genre.

In Cowboys & Aliens, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) is an outlaw who wakes up in the middle of the desert with no memories, tons of people after him, and an odd metal bracelet which doesn't seem to come off. He wanders into town, interacting with the locals, many of which want him thrown in jail, especially Sheriff Taggart (Keith Carradine),  Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), and his father Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). Soon after as Jake is about to be taken away, aliens invade the town, kidnapping locals until Jake springs into action and finally finds out what that damn metal bracelet is good for. Soon after the first attack, Jake, his love interest Ella (Olivia Wilde) and many of the other locals who haven't been abducted take off on a journey to save their fellow townspeople and defeat the aliens once and for all.

There is very little redeeming qualities about Cowboy & Aliens, but one area where I will give props to are the special effects. The crew members who worked on those were some of the rare in between participants who earned their paychecks for this movie. The scenes with the aliens are awesome and I loved watching them and all of the destruction that they caused with the people.

As for performances, though most faltered (which I will start mentioning in an upcoming paragraph), one standout was Olivia Wilde. In addition to being absolutely beautiful, Wilde makes the very best of a threadbare, underutilized character. I will easily say that she is the actor that should hold her head the highest when viewing this movie. One of the few performances that isn't overbearing, obnoxious, or one-note.

And now for the negatives, which were certainly far greater in numbers than the positives. For one, combining two genres was an awful idea. The western scenes are flat, tedious, contrived, and unoriginal as hell. Nothing noteworthy happens except for a bunch of ridiculous speeches about bonding, being a man, and you get my point. Because that's totally what people want to see in a genre that's all about action. And they pretty much feel like they're copied and pasted from better movies of this genre. Steal from the best. Cowboys & Aliens even fails at that. The scenes with the aliens are just as bad. They rarely show up and you don't learn anything about them. Apparently, they're on Earth for gold but you don't understand what the purpose of gold is to them. It's such a silly idea that's never even explained at all. None of the scenes are exciting with the aliens mainly due to the amount of questions and tedium that follow. You're even supposed to believe that these aliens are such ridiculously intelligent creatures despite leaving a deadly bracelet within arms reach of the main character. What the fuck?

The performances are ridiculous as well. Daniel Craig is such a bore as the main lead. He grunts every line without any excitement or energy at all. He must have been taking lessons from Harrison Ford, who is even worse in this movie. He pretty much barks every line and for fuck's sake...IF YOU'RE 9000 YEARS OLD, STOP APPEARING IN ACTION MOVIES. Shit. Can't wait for the sequel where the Golden Girls are sword fighting with a bunch of pirates. Oh! I forgot someone else. Paul Dano....what a big step down from Little Miss Sunshine. Every scene with him (and thank God there's not that many) is totally pathetic and ridiculous. He's such an obnoxious, irritating character you wish the aliens would shut his fucking mouth before he even gets his second line out.

The story moves along like an alien oozing his goo on the ground. So many plot holes are present that you could jump in one and end up in China. For one...apparently the way to get the bracelet off is to...stop thinking. Yeah. You heard me. There's no codes. No passwords. Not even a fucking lockbox. Stop thinking. And these are the aliens we're supposed to believe are so much more superior in terms of intelligence than humans. Oh! And Ella's story line is pathetic. A little past the middle of the movie, her journey takes a flying leap off the tracks, resulting in one of the most ridiculous endings of 2011. I'll give you a hint. She's not human. Nor is she an alien. I'm not really sure what she is but based on all the intelligence dedicated to her character's journey...neither did she.

Cowboys & Aliens is easily going to be on my worst movies of 2011 list. Humor must have been on vacation in another planet. So were strong performances, an intelligent script, a cohesive story, a solid ending, or any credible explanations about the aliens or some of the other characters in the story. I would rather be beamed up by the most malicious aliens in history over sitting through one more viewing of Cowboys & Aliens.

0/4