Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

  Finally got to see this with New Boyfriend.  It's not bad.  I know the critics have been savaging it.  (44% on Rotten Tomatoes.)  It's not as good as Iron Man, by any stretch, but it's not a waste of film.

I suppose I was expecting a lot more from Harrison Ford.  Lately it seems like Indy has been playing the Grizzled Old Man card one too many times.  One of my favorite things about him as an actor was how mobile his face was.  He had the best range of expressions and a lot of the humor in his movies came when he didn't say anything at all.  He'd just throw a Look and it would be enough.  That is sadly lacking in this film.  Granted, he's playing a man of questionable motives but still, a little flexibility would have been nice.  Everybody else in the movie did a great job, especially Daniel Craig but I expect no less from James Bond.

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up with no memory and an interesting bracelet in the middle of the desert.  He's set upon by three disreputable types with fresh scalps on their pommels and he murders the shit out of them, gaining a new wardrobe, a horse, and a dog.  He then proceeds to the nearest town, a two-bit mining village on its last leg, being supported solely on the money Colonel Dolarhyde's (Harrison Ford) cattle brings.  His son (Paul Dano) acts exactly like the spoiled only child of the town's richest man, drunkenly firing a gun in the streets.  Jake teaches him a sharp lesson on the end of his knee and Dolarhyde Junior shoots a deputy in the arm.  The Sheriff (Keith Carradine) arrests him, then arrests Jake (with a little help from Olivia Wilde) for holding up a gold shipment.  Col Dolarhyde's gold.  So the angry daddy comes to town with a posse to a) get his kid back and b) string up Lonergan.

Then the aliens show up and start fly-fishing for settlers, roping them and carrying them off.  You've seen this bit in the trailer, where Jake's bracelet comes alive and he's able to use it to bring down one of the ships.

The people taken include the Sheriff, Dolarhyde's son, and Sam Rockwell's wife.  So a posse is put together to track one of the aliens who had been hurt back to its base camp.  From this point, it's very much like a typical quest movie.  There are some decent laughs, mostly provided by Craig, though Walton Goggins (Justified) has a great small part.

Overall, I probably wouldn't buy it but it was a decent enough summer film.  Matinee or rental.