The Worst of Two Worlds

I liked the idea of last year's summer blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens a great deal -- an alien invasion movie lovingly mashed up with a period western. But the word of mouth was generally unkind, so I banished the film to a sub-basement of my Netflix queue. No decent monster can be kept down, though, and recently these otherworldly ones clawed their way to the top of my queue and into my Blu-ray player.

As the opening credits rolled, I found myself rooting for the movie more and more with each new name. I was aware beforehand of stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, of course. I didn't know that the movie also featured the brilliant and versatile Sam Rockwell, veteran character actor Clancy Brown, the gravitas avatar that is Keith Carradine, the powerful and nuanced Walton Goggins, and the interesting and odd Paul Dano. Oh, please be good, please be good, pleasebegood...

No?

Okay then... don't be bad, don't be bad, dontbebad...

Damn.

Actually, I found Cowboys & Aliens to be flat out boring above all else. A mashup of two film types, the film takes the most belabored and established elements of both. Daniel Craig's character is a "Man With No Name" type, literally with amnesia of his past, but the entire audience knows exactly what that past is way before he learns it. The aliens are of an ultra-conventional "abduct you and experiment on you" variety. The action is all about explosions and never about any of the characters doing anything clever or resourceful. By 45 minutes in, my attention was waning. Another 45 minutes later (and with a half hour still to go), I was actually fighting to stay awake on my couch.

The actors involved do keep the film from being a total loss. There's some novelty in the dialects: Daniel Craig disguising his British accent for once; Harrison Ford going extra gruff and gravelly. Sam Rockwell plays a fun character with a weak spine, but it's territory he played oh-so-much-better in Galaxy Quest. And the other actors I mentioned being interested in? None of them has more than 10 minutes of screen time at the very best.

Things do blow up good, and there is some interesting creature design on the aliens. But by and large, the movie is a very loud waste of time and talent. I grade it a D+.