Tag Archive: Daniel Craig

Movie Review – Cowboys & Aliens

Having just got back from Fort Worth, TX you’d have thought we’d have been overloaded on Cowboys (and you’d be right) but apparently not overloaded enough to keep us from going to the cheap theatre here to catch up on one we missed in it’s initial release, “Cowboys & Aliens”.

Daniel Craig stars as the mystery man with, who may or may not be a bad guy, who awakens in the desert with no memory and a metal bracelet attached to his arm.  Harrison Ford is the powerful landowner bullying the town and accusing Craig of having stolen his gold in a stagecoach robbery.  But then Alien spaceships show up and kidnap a bunch of the town folk, and these two adversaries must temporarily set aside their differences to form a posse to track down the Aliens and rescue the town folk.

All the standard conventions of a typical western are present, and yet, so are all the standard conventions of a typical alien invasion flick.  It’s an interesting miss-mash of ideas, and while the concept is completely ridiculous, it’s a big, goofy, fun ridiculous.  Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of getting Indiana Jones and James Bond on screen together should have been more… epic?  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the movie, I did, and there are some great performances here.  Daniel Craig is his usual stoic self, but Harrison Ford plays a slightly bent rancher who actually has a few extra levels of depth to him, and Ford explores that by not being completely likeable, but not exactly a villain either.  In great supporting roles are the always enjoyable Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine and Sam Rockwell.

Enjoyable if not exactly memorable, you could certainly do worse than to see this movie, but at the same time, I’m not complaining that we saw it at the discount theatre.

COWBOYS & ALIENS – B-