Cowboys, Aliens And a Headache

I had high hopes for Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys and Aliens.” Often these genrecombos can be quite entertaining, such as William Beaudine’s 1966classic “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter,” which was part of a drive-in double bill with “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.” Jean Rollin merged the wartime romance with the subaquatic Nazi zombie flick in 1981’s “Zombie Lake,” widely held to be one of the worst and most hilarious films of all time.Heck, “Star Wars” is basically a Western, with space ships. Favreau’s “Iron Man” films were both amusing pictures that didn’t take themselves too seriously and moved right along.But “Cowboys and Aliens” is one dark, unpleasant and ultimately tedious summer blockbuster. Jake (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of the desert with a weird wound, some kind of space-age bracelet on his wrist and a bad case of amnesia. He guns down three strangers by way of establishing his bona fides, and rides into town as The Stranger. There he establishes himself as someone who won’t bebullied, mostly by beating up the sheriff’s deputies and smacking down thelocal cattle baron’s punk kid. Dolarhyde, the cattle baron (played by Harrison Ford with a sore throat), isn’t too thrilled by this, but any revenge is given the quick kibosh by the alien attack — these things that look like a cross between a Stealth bomber and a boomerangthat whizz through town, lasso random people and take off. So the guys all form a posse and head off to search, for what wasn’t clear. They find a paddleboat upside down in the desert, camp in it, and the aliens make their screen debut. They are of the nasty, slimy, teeth ’n’ talons type familiar from, well, “Alien.” Then there’s a whole mess of campfire beans with bandits and Indians and extraterrestrial gold mining and so on, all culminating in a big shootout.Luckily for mankind, the aliens are quite vulnerable to good old 19th-centuryweaponry, like six-shooters and dynamite. The film’s prevailing mood is gloomy and claustrophobic, unleavened by humor, never mind character development or any high-falutin’ city slicker stuff like that. Lots of stuff blows up. People die in unpleasant ways. Gratuitous gingham dress onHardy Pioneer Woman Ella (Olivia Wilde). Old West kung fu. Mind control. Brief nudity that is entirely essential to the plot. And the title’s no lie: you get plenty of cowboys and aliens. And a headache, in my case. “Cowboys and Aliens” is slow, loud, overlong and, frankly, no fun at all.(I would also caution against taking smaller children to this film. The film’s mood is so oppressive, the violence actually comes as a relief. I can see a spike in night-light sales should the under-12 crowd set see this.) “Cowboys and Aliens” is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere. It is rated PG-13 for violence, partial nudity and a crude reference.

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