Jon Favreau's titles tell his audience exactly what they are going to get. Buy a ticket to Elf, and you'll see Will Ferrell as an overgrown minion of jolly old St. Nick. Rent Iron Man and you'll thrill to the story of a man who fights the world's evils wearing an iron suit. See? Pretty simple.
Once again, Favreau delivers on the promise of Cowboys & Aliens by delivering cowboys and aliens, but for the first time in his 10-year directing career, there isn't a lot waiting for us beyond the filmmaker's basic plot summary. It's a great title, yes, but only a decent movie, and one that spends every flop-sweat-stained minute trying to live up to the inherent coolness of its genre-mashing premise.
Working from Scott Michell Rosenberg's 2006 graphic novel of the same name, Favreau and a team of six credited screenwriters (including Transformers scribes Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman) have come up with a fairly conventional monster movie that just happens to take place in an unconventional setting -- in this case, the practically abandoned Western outpost known as Absolution.
Into this ghost town wanders Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), an outlaw suffering amnesia who awoke from a coma with a high-tech metal bracelet around his wrist and the photo of a woman he can't recall. At least two people remember Lonergan. The beautiful Ella (Olivia Wilde) thinks Jake can help her with a task we'll learn more about in the film's second act, while the villainous Dolarhyde (a surly Harrison Ford) wants the gold Jake and his gang reportedly stole.
Favreau knows his way around the Western genre, hanging his hat on comfortable clichés in hopes of convincing his audience to drop their guard. He wants them to be surprised when he shoehorns a foreign format -- actually, a full-on alien format -- into his story structure. It seems a better name for the town of Absolution would be Abduction, because saucer-flying extraterrestrials are lassoing townsfolk left and right and carrying them off for experimentation. Following a volatile first encounter, which Favreau stages with ample sound and fury, Lonergan and Dolarhyde form a rescue party and set off into the wilderness to retrieve their "kin."
If you read the original Cowboys & Aliens books, you know virtually nothing I just said appears in the pages of Rosenberg's comics. So why mount an adaptation at all if your plan is to overlook the source material?
That's a question Favreau's film doesn't answer. Add it to the list of substantial mysteries left unsolved by the flaccid Aliens screenplay, which sidesteps such questions as "Why do space creatures need our gold?" or "Are we really supposed to believe the alien mothership could hide in plain sight in the middle of our country's desert and not be spotted until now?"
Favreau hasn't made a bad film, just an ordinary one, and you can't settle for average when you're dangling the carrot of Cowboys & Aliens before a summer blockbuster crowd. There isn't one memorable set piece in the film, despite a decent set-up in an upside down riverboat (which goes nowhere) and a by-the-numbers confrontation in the film's final act. Admittedly, it's hard to compose a symphony when your actors are asked to play the same notes over and over.
Favreau's film is the first in a series of genre-blending projects that sit in Hollywood's creative pipeline, ones that promise to mix Jane Austen's literary works with undead zombies or America's Civil War history with vampire-hunting skills. I can only hope that these films find more to do with their cool-on-paper premises than Favreau musters with Aliens. With the high-tech tools that are at his disposal and the imagination we've seen him employ in Iron Man and Zathura, I really thought Favreau would reinvent the wagon wheel when it came to Westerns and sci-fi creature features. Instead, he simply added another spoke, and his wheel keeps spinning in place.
