Director: Jon Favreau
Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde
Yes! A great combo of past and future
No! Poor character development

Jake Lonergan (Craig) wakes up in the middle of the desert with no memory and a macguffin on his wrist. Arriving in a town, he encounters Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), the man who put a bounty on his head, and Ella (Wilde), a mysterious woman who is very interested in his wrist accessory. Suddenly, the small mining town is struck by alien abductors and a motley crew ventures out to find their kidnapped kin.

It should have been an unstoppable combination – James Bond, Han Solo/Indiana Jones, the director of Iron Man, and Stephen frickin’ Spielberg keeping at all together.

Considering the mind-blowingness implied with that team, it was disappointing.

But considering Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex, it was amazing. It’s a scifi Western actually worth watching.

It’s mostly an action film, of course, with humans scrapping with one another before even getting involved with aliens. The focus on action and ass-kicking made the emotional aspects seem awkwardly tacked on.

The out-of-the-blue emotion could, of course, be harking back to the spaghetti westerns of old that didn’t have the same emotional arcs like those we’ve become accustomed to, with more being implied than overtly expressed.

At times it felt like a PG13 Deadwood (with aliens), and I blame that on the presence of Keith Carradine. But even though it lacked the cussing and sex of the HBO show, it didn’t feel like a silly, childish ideal of the wild west. It was still dirty and lawless.

Despite the gratuitous pouting, the actors are fun to watch. And a gruff-voiced Ford was well cast.

It’s not as good as other blockbusters released recently, like Captain America, Super 8 and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but if you’ve seen all those already, this one is worth a watch.