As long as you go into Cowboys & Aliens with no expectations you won’t be disappointed. It’s titled Cowboys & Aliens for god’s sake. I didn’t know if I should expect comedy, western, horror, or sci-fi. I definitely didn’t expect the next Citizen Kane (or my personal favorite, Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans). What I got was two-hours of mindless entertainment made better by the filmmakers’ attempts at giving the audience characters to care about and seeing Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones) together onscreen.
Cue man-love.
The plot is simple: aliens invade the Old West, taking helpless citizens for experiments in order to eventually enslave them to mine gold. At least I think so. It’s never explained well. But who cares?
Aliens looking for gold—yes, you read that right. As Olivia Wilde’s character explains, “They’re the same as you.” Gold serves to provide the film’s protagonist, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig, yes the name is a pun) with his eventual turn. Before Jake and his lover were abducted by these same aliens and he lost his memory, he was an outlaw. Gold was his means of getting out of the business. Except that he robbed Harrison Ford’s gold. And Harrison is pissed.
Ford’s character, Col. Dollarhyde (yes, another pun), rules the town of Absolution. He’s introduced in a nifty scene where he brutally interrogates a ranch hand by stringing the guy between two horses and having them almost pull him apart. Ford’s a great bad guy, and he seems to be enjoying himself, especially in the scene where he tells a boy of slitting a dying man’s throat in the aftermath of an Apache settlement raid. Good, grumpy Ford stuff.
The film’s first hour sets up its drama: Craig and Ford’s characters have to work together with other townsfolk in order to understand the alien menace. Other characters include Sam Rockwell’s Doc (well done), Keith Carradine’s sheriff (finely acted), Adam Beach as Ford’s surrogate son (sadly wasted in a stock role), Paul Dano as Ford’s dimwit biological son (Dano is miles from his There Will Be Blood character), Clancy Brown’s preacher (who has the best lines) and Olivia Wilde’s townie with all the mystical answers. The film’s penchant for sexualizing Wilde is obnoxious. She sports a see-through gown with hard nipples in almost every shot. This reinforces the modern image of beautiful women being doe-eyed and in need of food.
Cowboys & Aliens is nothing to gush over. It’s just good fun. The alien design is great. The monsters thrill. They’re nasty, violent critters. The last hour of the movie is all action, special effects, and character turns, most of them done well, some not. I would have liked to see Ford’s character turn happen gradually instead of him defeating the aliens and going, “Well, I’ll be a good guy now.” Craig is good, too, but he’s basically Eastwood’s Man with No Name. All he does is scowl. But he has presence, which helps the audience want to follow him.
I had to laugh at the film’s last lines. Ford’s character, now a good guy, tells Craig he is looking for a dependable man on his ranch. Leaning against a post below the saloon, he says it like a come-on: “I need a good man around here.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the filmmakers’ knowledge of all those still-little-boys, like me, who saw Cowboys & Aliens simply to see Indy and 007 in the same movie. B-
Of note is this video, which may be the highlight of a string of recent humorous Ford late night appearances. In it, he berates an old co-star. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWTtMdXAazs
Don’t just take my opinion. Here are some more reviews:
No comments:
Post a Comment