Cowboys & Aliens

With Wit, Reviewed By Kimmo Mustonenen

Cowboys & Aliens.  Who didn’t play this game in the backyard, when you were children?

I was always a cowboy for I had a hat.  It (the scenario) was better on my neighbor Kurri’s backyard; than it was on the big-ass screen.

Story?  Well, here goes something…

If a stranger wakes up in the middle in New Mexico in 1873, he does not have memory of his past.

So says this film.

The only reference point which he has is, clamped to his wrist, an outlandish metal bracelet.

The foreigner walks into the city of Absolution and confuses and angers of the local cattle baron – his son.  And he has run afoul and a brigand (yes, at the same time).

But when he finds out why he can’t think (not booze – though that has made me not think – like last Wednesday… but that is for another article – boy, I was drunk) – I just got lost in my own sentence.

And from here, Cowboys & Aliens enters into same old, same old cycle, which has the again formed group to run into sporadic detours on their journey – only to be alien attacked again and again.

I miss Indians.

The attacks are shot acceptable.  Director Jon Favreau is not stranger to the shooting activity, but there’s no tension, no edge of their seat excitement, which should come at all directions and from each possible position of constraint.

And then we find the heroes can die.

No one never did die in the Kurri’s backyard (not for lack of trying).

Cowboys & Aliens is played fast and loose. The film wastes no time with receiving firmly into and soon it is alien time.

This sets the movie away from other, shy, films.  Like Super 8.  Show the monster already!

Daniel Craig forms persuasive ass-kicker, for very much a cowboy.  That is, if you’ve never seen a movie about cowboys – with or without aliens.

I won’t spoil the alien look.  They’re gnarly and ugly – like Kathy Griffin (ha!  A joke!).

But even awkward exhibition and lengthy letters can work on their way into an exciting adventure film. Unfortunately, no person it seems in Cowboys & Aliens seems to have fun.  

Harrison Ford grumbles with constipation, which does in each film for the last several years (two words – stool softener.  Changed my life).

There are moments here and, where he and Craig talk to each other with their eyeballs.  Those moments are cool.  

Sam Rockwell seems the only member which thoroughly amuses himself.  At my screening, the chant “More Sam, more Sam” made the rafters dance (disco!).

And this disappointment continues and on into approximately each aspect of Cowboys & Aliens (that is fun to type).

A western film, tries to have John Ford landscapes, can not strike the necessary boundry-lessness of the west – and the alien motivation for the Earth grabbing?  Stupid, stupid, stupid (my editor stops me at three stupids).

Summary:  Cowboy & Aliens was better in the Kurri’s backyard of my childhood than in the multiplex which now probably fills the backyard of your youth.

Oh, and Olivia Wilde is fetching (new word)!

Kimmo Mustonenen (Kimmo On Kino) – Behind The Proscenium