It’s all so much high-gloss make-believe incapable of establishing any foundational element of its fiction, which proves troublesome once the script (based on Scott Mitchell Rosenberg’s 2006 graphic novel) begins straddling the line between gunslinger showdowns and out-of-this-world craziness. Despite collaborating with expert DP Matthew Libatique, Favreau’s visuals have an inauthentic and bland blockbuster sheen, and his actors are similarly afflicted with a case of poseur-itis (Craig’s affected silent-type glowering, Ford’s gruff racism, or Wilde’s blank, wide-eyed stares), failing to deliver a single believable line-reading or gesture. On the basis of his directorial oeuvre, no one would have mistaken Jon Favreau for John Ford, yet Cowboys & Aliens’s western accoutrements are still so false as to be stunning, with every steely-eyed glare from Craig’s Man With No Memory, every confrontation between his Jake and Ford’s grizzled Dolarhyde, and every silhouetted horseback ride across a sunset range seeming like a wan approximation of a familiar genre staple.
Thus Jake, Dolarhyde, and a few random others-saloon owner Doc (Sam Rockwell), Dolarhyde’s Native American servant Nat (Adam Beach), and enigmatic beauty Ella (Olivia Wilde)-set out in search of their seized brethren, a quest that leads them from a fake-looking frontier town across generic scraggly plains to similarly bogus stage sets, including an upside-down riverboat in the desert and an E.T.
A run-in with three bandits proves that he knows how to kick ass, however, and after an altercation with the cocky son (Paul Dano) of cattle baron Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) in a struggling mining town lands him in deep trouble, he discovers that his newfound high-tech jewelry has a purpose-namely, to help him laser-blast insectoid spaceships, which bombard the community with explosive blasts and use glowing cables to snatch up citizens and take them to whereabouts unknown. This hybrid of an oater and an extraterrestrial-invasion saga opens with Jake (Daniel Craig) awakening in the 1873 Arizona desert with a mysterious metal bracelet on his wrist and no idea who he is or how he got there.
Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.