Cowboys and Aliens (2011) Directed by: Jon Favreau. Stars: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde. Verdict: SUCKS.

Does this film have a genre? Western, Sci-fi, action, adventure, comic. What is it?
It tries to embody all of these elements and genres and the end result is far from desirable. Everything just feels cheesy and fake. The western scenes feel inauthentic. The archetypal cowboy visuals of a man on horseback or the small frontier town just don’t hit home quite the way they should. This haunts the film from beginning to end. You never once think you’re watching a true western or wonder when you’ll see John Wayne and Clint Eastwood come riding over the hill. It can best be described as a plastic model of what a western should be. When the aliens enter the scene it almost seems silly. Not campy, which might have added a little something to the film, just out of place. You can’t juxtapose CGI aliens with a down-home country scene and expect it to be cinema magic. Director Jon Favreau described his vision as a blend between Sergio Leone and Alien. He fell way, way short of those ambitions.

I just don’t understand the casting decisions. Olivia Wilde, for example. What about Olivia Wilde and her perfectly symmetrical face says western frontier girl? She looks out of place the entire film, like she just got off of a time machine and landed in Stupidville, USA. Harrison Ford manages to seem out of place as well. He comes across as a crazy old coot, and not because that’s his character, just because that’s his personality. Ford possesses in this film none of the charisma that made him a star in his younger days. In the Indiana Jones movies, Ford lit up the screen and everything he did seemed almost magical. Seeing him in this role just makes the audience sad. Daniel Craig makes sense to a degree but in half of his scenes he is just staring off in the distance with minimal dialogue. He isn’t gruff enough to pull off the patented man with no name star that Eastwood did, it just makes him look mildly challenged.

The old saying goes that the whole is more than the sum of it’s parts. In this case, however, that does not ring true. Taking odds and ends of multiple genres and jamming them together with a thin coating of CGI on top is not a recipe for success. The film just barely recouped it’s budget and only narrowly beat out The Smurfs on opening weekend. I mean, come on, it lost out to THE SMURFS.