Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Yee-haw, cowboy. I have mixed feelings about this film. Still rounding out to be generally positive, but definitely mixed. The problem with Cowboys & Aliens is that it is not smart. And coming from a movie that touts ‘from the director of Iron Man’, one would expect it to be smart. Iron Man was a brilliant movie, my second favorite superhero movie of all time, behind The Dark Knight. This definitely feels more like a movie from the director of Iron Man 2 than the director of Iron Man. Both Iron Man 2 and Cowboys & Aliens are fun movies, even if they are stupid at times. Personally, I think that Cowboys & Aliens shows this better. For starters, I enjoyed Cowboys & Aliens more than I did Iron Man 2, and it was stupider. Here, we have The Man with No Name injected with a lethal dose of Independence Day. That’s how you can sum up this movie. Based off of the graphic novel of the same name, this movie follows a man (Daniel Craig), who has no idea who he is, but he is awesome. He takes down four men with only their weapons. He’s awesome. But he finds out that he is a wanted man, and is taken away. Then aliens come, and a strange alien contraption attached to his wrist (Omnitrix, anyone?) is the only thing that can defeat it. So they fight the aliens. An A-B-C plot for an A-B-C movie. And that’s not the bad thing. It’s just that it’s formulaic. The film is extremely formulaic. Everything is carefully analyzed and played out. The direction is played out. The screenplay is played out. The acting is generic, even from such a cast. The cast is Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Noah Ringer, Paul Dano, and more. What I have to say about the cast and characters that they play are that they are generic. But I do have to mention two things. One, Noah Ringer surprised me. The only movie other than this that I have seen that he has been in was The Last Airbender, which is one of the worst movies ever made. I thought he was a terrible actor. But…he’s not. He’s actually pretty good. It was just Shaymalamadingdong that made him look terrible. Here, he’s not bad. So good for him. And two, I have a major problem with Olivia Wilde’s character. In the middle of the film, there is a revelation that is completely insane. It is one of the stupidest moments in a film this year. And I have seen a good bit of stupid films this year. This moment is so out-of-place, so awful, so dumb that it actually knocked my grade down a bit. So as a note to the writer of the comic/screenwriter(s)-this movie might have a positive review right here, but it’s not because of you.
7.5/10