Harrison Ford as the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde and Daniel Craig as a stranger with no memory of his past in Cowboys & Aliens.
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In its first half, when it's content to plunder favorite Western tropes, the movie provides some vagrant pleasures. The supporting actors savor each element of their characters as if it were the tastiest tobacco chaw. (Kudos, in passing, to Rockwell, Browning, Beach and Ringer.) Lonergan's entry into the Absolution saloon plays like a live-action reprise of a similar scene in Rango, with Johnny Depp voicing a cowboy chameleon; but that just proves the sturdiness of the genre, and the ability of modern filmmakers to honor and tweak Western conventions. And when tough-guy Craig confronts mean-man Ford, it's like the world champion glare-off of steely blue eyes.
In Hollywood's ancient prime, maybe a third of all movies were Westerns. But those days are as dead as the horse-mounted cavalry; in the past 30 years, the genre has been resuscitated only when some powerful director wanted to make a movie like the ones he grew up loving. So Cowboys & Aliens has got to get to the aliens pretty damn quick. Even here, Favreau and his crew sprinkle a few memorable moments: the aliens' low-flying scout planes, looking like 10-winged titanium dragonflies and lassoing the townspeople for abduction; a desert vision of an upside-down steamship, which momentarily summons the ghost of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo; and the recurring image of Craig retrieving his cowboy hat, whether he's fighting off human varmints or escaping from the aliens' stronghold. A man ain't a man without his Stetson.
Gradually, though, the movie sinks into ordinariness, serving up too many Spielbergian reaction shots of each cast member gawking or gulping at an alien encounter, and too many moral lessons that must be learned or taught. Cowboys & Aliens is the kind of movie where anything that happens in Act One (the kid is given a knife, the saloonkeeper doesn't know how to shoot) will predictably pay off in Act Three. And why is the ancient wisdom of Indian shamans always taken at face value? Modern movies usually mock a Christian's belief in miracles; yet the summoning of spirits by aboriginal Americans, here as in other Westerns, is shown as a certain conduit to another, higher world.
These clichés test the attention span of viewers and force them into the fallback job of seeing how the actors are doing. Wilde, as an ethereal cowgirl with a few mysteries of her own, has not a trace of 19th-century dust on her slim frame, but her runway beauty seizes the screen. Craig, in the interval between his last James Bond movie and his starring role in David Fincher's remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, occupies the Lonergan character forcefully, though his appeal still stops just this side of star quality. And Ford, as he's done ever since the early Star Wars movies, overindulges in scowling and growling. He should know by now that his weathered face is its own cranky editorial comment.
We wish that the movie had lived up to our expectations and its makers' ambitions. But in films as in foods, some hybrids make sense and others don't. Cowboys & Aliens could have been the tangelo of genre-blenders. Instead, it's more like the Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancake & Sausage on a Stick.