COWBOYS & ALIENS
**
DIRECTED BY Jon Favreau
STARS Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford
Paul Dano, the twitchy oddball from Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood, plays the son of stalwart Harrison Ford in Cowboys & Aliens, and the collective thought grasping moviegoers nationwide will be that Shia LaBeouf suddenly doesn't seem that implausible as Indiana Jones's offspring. That's not meant to be taken as a criticism of this new picture — it's merely an observation, the sort that increasingly pops up to distract audiences from the fact that there's not much of interest going on during the second half of this hybrid of two genres beloved by Old Hollywood (Westerns) and New Hollywood (science fiction).
Cowboys & Aliens boasts a high-concept hook (and moniker) so obvious and promising that it's amazing this angle wasn't first tackled at least 30 years ago. Instead, this is based on a graphic novel that was released five years ago, and even at that, director Jon Favreau and his army of writers (six receive official credit; who knows how many toiled anonymously on various drafts) elected to toss out almost everything except the bare bones premise of, yes, cowboys and aliens mixing it up.
The movie works best toward the beginning, before potential gives way to actual execution. In the rocky New Mexico Territory of 1875, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up with no memory of his identity or what led him to this spot; all he knows is that there's an unusual metallic contraption wrapped around his left wrist. He stumbles into a nearby town, where he witnesses young whippersnapper Percy Dolarhyde (Dano) bullying the meek citizens, especially saloon owner Doc (Sam Rockwell). A mysterious beauty named Ella (Olivia Wilde in what might have been the Megan Fox role had the latter not professionally imploded) hangs around, Percy's powerful pop Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) shows up to bellow at the townspeople, and before you know it, all of these oater conventions are blasted to smithereens around the same time the aliens show up and start blasting the town and snatching up its citizenry. As Jake leads a small band to rescue those who've been nabbed, he starts to piece together exactly what had happened to him — and works on figuring out a way to defeat these otherworldly assailants.
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