Cowboys & Idiots

Cowboys & Aliens, written by a committee, directed by the guy who directed Iron Man, starring James Bond, Indiana Jones and the hot woman from House, M.D. and Tron: Legacy (2011): Intermittently enjoyable though repeatedly frustrating. With that title, it should be a dizzy romp. It isn't. It's really sort of a slog, strangely self-serious and numbingly dumb. It was written by a committee, and as with a lot of committee end-product, the good seems to have been thrown out in favour of the bad and the mediocre.

Harrison Ford's performance could have earned the movie the title Dead Man Walking: it's one of Ford's worst late-career sleepwalks. Though Harrison Ford would be a very angry sleepwalker based on his performance here: he pretty much alternates between looking constipated and looking like he wants to kill everyone on the set, possibly because they're on his lawn.

Giant alien leprechauns come to the American Old West in the 1870's to mine gold and kidnap people for insidious experiments aimed at determining how best to eradicate humanity. Daniel Craig plays a stagecoach robber who's lost his memory and now has an alien wristwatch/energy weapon attached to his wrist. The aliens kidnap a bunch of townsfolk. Craig and angry-granpa rancher Ford lead a ragtag group against the aliens, aided by an alien from a different race who's currently cosplaying as Olivia Wilde.

Thankfully for humanity, these aliens are even dumber than the aliens in Skyline. Also, they belong to the gigantic sub-category of advanced interstellar races who are also nudists (see: Skyline, E.T. , The War of the Worlds, Independence Day, ad infinitum, ad nauseum) who despite possessing devastating energy weapons prefer to get it on like a man and beat you down with their hands and bodyslam you in the Wild Wild West! Not recommended.