I would not pay any more of my hard-earned cash-money to rewatch Jon Favreau’s latest, Cowboys & Aliens, in theaters. I also wouldn’t Netflix, Redbox or pay for it On Demand. I might be willing to watch like 10-15 minutes of it were I to stumble across it accidentally on the old TV, but you’d have to squeeze my shoes pretty hard to get me to watch any more than that. And you know what, it’s not even that Cowboys & Aliens is all that bad: Daniel Craig does a decent job as his 007 bad-a** self; Harrison Ford, well, he probably should’ve retired from acting after The Devil’s Own (1997); the aliens are kind’a creepy (the little arms!?!); and the Western mis-en-scene is pretty convincing (the one glaring, water-beaded exception being Olivia “I’m in WAY too many movies right now, HOLY SH*T” Wilde’s makeup).
The problem with Cowboys & Aliens is that it wasn’t half as fun as it should’ve been (I’d have been far more willing than I’d like to admit to overlook Wilde’s character’s returning from death, emerging from a fire, being some buck-naked alien spirit-thing, had the movie actually been a fun one). How it was possible for Favreau and Co. to make a movie about cowboys meeting/fighting aliens pretty much entirely un-fun is beyond the proverbial pale.
I chalk-up most of C & As’ un-funness to the casting of Daniel Craig in the lead. Craig’s super-serious, 007 bad-a** self would’ve been pitch-perfect in yours truly’s favorite western, The Proposition (2005), but in Cowboys & Aliens, man, it just sucked the fun right out of d*mn near everything from the get-go.
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