Cowboys & Aliens''
Director Jon Favreau's genre mash-up is more a mush-up, an action yarn aiming to be both science fiction and Old West adventure but doing neither all that well. The filmmakers - and there are a lot, among them 11 producers or executive producers including Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, plus half a dozen credited writers - start with a title that lays out a simple but cool premise: invaders from the skies shooting it out with guys on horseback. For all the talent involved, they wound up keeping the story too simple, almost simple-minded, leaving a terrific cast led by Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde stuck in a sketchy, sometimes poky tale where you get cowboys occasionally fighting aliens and not much more. Craig's a stony-faced amnesiac with a weird hunk of metal locked on his wrist who wanders into a dusty town just before alien craft swoop in and start abducting the locals. He joins cattle baron Ford's posse to retrieve the missing and teach these creatures not to mess with hardy western pioneers. PG-13 for intense sequences of western and sci-fi action and violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference. 118 minutes. Two stars out of four.
David Germain, AP Movie Writer
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