The key to what made Iron Man such a great summer-movie surprise a few years ago wasn't its effects-filled action set pieces, although director Jon Favreau handled those with aplomb, but how the character-driven scenes between the requisite explosions really breathed in a loose, witty way. Favreau allowed star and MVP Robert Downey Jr., along with a first-rate supporting cast, so much room to banter that the viewer could be forgiven for thinking at times that what was unfolding onscreen wasn't a superhero flick but a relaxed and exquisitely acted ensemble comedy.
For the inviting first 30 minutes of Cowboys & Aliens (2011, Jon Favreau), Favreau seems to be taking a similar approach to this graphic-novel-inspired postmodern merging of the old-school oater with high-tech sci-fi. Like any classic Western, Cowboys & Aliens fills its cast with a couple of reliable above-the-title movie stars and an impressive roster of character actors enlisted to play assorted townsfolk. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford play, respectively, a mysterious badass with a piece of extraterrestrial hardware clamped around his wrist and a ruthless cattle baron who dominates the small town of Absolution, while the supporting cast populating Absolution includes Sam Rockwell as a meek saloon keeper, Adam Beach as a Native American working as the cattle baron's right-hand man, Keith Carradine as sherriff, Clancy Brown as a preacher, and Paul Dano (in the wormy James Spader Jr. mode we first got a glimpse of in There Will Be Blood) as the cattle baron's n'er-do-well alcoholic son. It's quite a line-up, and for a while, Favreau is content to let the actors ease into their archetypal characters and play around in what amounts to a lighthearted Old West romp. As in Iron Man, Favreau's strength is in getting out of the way of an accomplished cast and allowing room for unexpected humor to flourish (the juxtaposition of Craig's deadpan brutishness with Dano's trembly insecurity is the source of the best laughs). This strategy, along with handsome widescreen cinematography from d.p. Matthew Libatique, ensures that the first half-hour of Cowboys ambles along very pleasantly.
But then Favreau inexplicably changes his strategy a quarter of the way into the movie and decides to just get out of the way of a generic, horribly unimaginative screenplay credited to five (!) writers. Needless to say, this proves to be a considerably less rewarding creative approach (and I use the term "creative" loosely here). After aliens attack Absolution and kidnap a handful of its citizens, the rest of the town's denizens mount their horses and brave the rocky wilderness in order to find the aliens and rescue the captives. At the point when everyone leaves Absolution, I would strongly advise viewers to simply leave the theatre and mentally devise their own narrative course for the remaining 90 minutes. They would be nearly guaranteed to come up with more novel ideas than this film's army of screenwriters were able to, and as a bonus, they would have avoided an hour and a half of dull, aimless summer moviemaking by commitee.
The humor and liveliness really do seep out of the film once the actors get on horseback. The remainder of the movie joylessly rotates narratively unmotivated action scenes, grim chunks of exposition and backstory, and convenient yet insulting-to-the-audience narrative coincidences in an increasingly numbing cycle.
The action climax is at least somewhat noteworthy for providing plenty of cowboy-vs.-alien hand-to-hand brawling, which most recent alien-invasion movies, from Independence Day to War of the Worlds, have been either too timid or too high-minded to deliver. But that's about it for excitement. Even the aliens themselves disappoint with their derivative physical appearance. Why is that the creature designers behind this, Cloverfield, and Super 8 think that human-like leg and arm muscles make aliens fun and creepy to look at? I have no idea, but at least the tiresome second and third acts of Cowboys & Aliens can claim to be "muscular" in some superficial way. Grade: C
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