Dry Rio Bravo take with sci-fi overtones

COWBOYS AND ALIENS (2011)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

Never before have I seen a movie title that distills exactly what one should expect...and provide no background for the simple and simpleminded title. "Cowboys and Aliens" is an absolute bore of a movie - a crossbreed (mashup to the rest of you) of two genres, the Western and science-fiction, to less than spectacular effect. The title sells the movie's few rudimentary pleasures but its tone is at once joyless and indistinguishable from anything else.

Daniel Craig is a fierce, rugged thief who wakes up in the middle of the Arizona desert with complete amnesia. He wears a wrist contraption that looks alien to any 1870's prison shackles. He arrives in the town of Absolution, ruffles some feathers with a gun-toting young cowboy (Paul Dano, in the most animated performance in the movie), is imprisoned since he is on a Most Wanted list, ruffles more feathers with a cattle baron (Harrison Ford, in a performance that is the very definition of gruff) and, before one can say "High Noon," spaceships appear from the night sky and practically blow up the entire town. These ships also fire lassos that wrap themselves around an unlucky number of Absolution's finest and place them inside the vessels. This is definitely a nod to "War of the Worlds."

The tone of this murky film already put me off by the time Craig's character shows up in town. Who is this guy? We never quite find out aside from the fact that he is a wanted man and had a woman in his life who was abducted by aliens - he is practically an amnesiac from first frame to last. Ford's mean baron gives the legendary actor a chance to shake his heroic charisma but the character is still something of a cipher.

As a western, this mediocre movie moves at a snail's pace. Things do not get livelier with Olivia Wilde as a town prostitute who is not what she appears to be. Keith Carradine comes off best as a reluctant sheriff but he doesn't have enough screen time. Same with the fantastic presence of Clancy Brown as a gun-toting preacher, but he's gone before one can get accustomed to his colorful character. And when the vicious aliens do attack (who are interested in gold in the movie's only novel touch of irony), the film's action moves and radiates with no friction, no surprise, no tension. Since we can't care about the one-dimensional cowboys, cattle barons and thieves who display the bare minimum of character shadings, how can we care about explosions and cowboys on horseback being chased by these ships?

The aliens are large, freakish beasts that look like they can tear apart any puny human just by the touch of their fingernails, yet Ford can strike them on the head with anything at his disposal including his rifle and the aliens fall to the ground a little easily. It is that kind of movie, stunningly photographed, but it is not much fun and hardly memorable.