COWBOYS & ALIENS: We Got a Kid and a Dog – Why Not a Woman?

Cowboys and Aliens (2011) – Directed by Jon Favreau – Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Abigail Spencer, Noah Ringer, Paul Dano, and Walton Goggins.

Cowboys. Aliens. James Bond. Han Solo. Thirteen. Zaphod Beeblebrox. The Kurgan. Wild Bill Hickock. Boyd Crowder. In a film by the guy who brought you Iron Man and Elf. Obviously, COWBOYS & ALIENS is going to be a movie best described as …

Tedious.

Joyless.

A chore to watch.

COWBOYS & ALIENS is not a horrible movie but it is utterly disappointing in its mediocrity. Jon Favreau has become one of my favorite directors over the years, but all of the fun and energy he brought to many of his previous films is completely lacking here. Instead of taking his inspiration from westerns like The Professionals or Sam Raimi’s Quick and the Dead, Favreau seems to want to make something like The Man with No Name But with Aliens.

The question I have is, Why?

Daniel Craig spends the movie scowling. Harrison Ford spends the movie growling. Olivia Wilde spends the movie looking concerned. Sam Rockwell spends the movie whining. The aliens spend the movie capturing and torturing humans and only one of them has even a blip of a personality. I’ve nothing against a serious western or a serious sci-fi flick, of course, but when you’ve assembled this much talent and you’re spending over $160 million to make a summer film … I don’t know, I’d kind of like to be having a good time. It’s incredibly disappointing because Favreau’s strength is getting the best out of personalities, and here … nothing.

I don’t want to rag too hard on Favreau because, as I said, I think he’s a fantastic director, but he clearly drops the ball with COWBOYS & ALIENS. The story here is solid, but it’s all filmed and paced roboticly. There’s no personality in his direction, no life. It’s seemingly just one “set up a camera and shoot whatever happens” shot after another.

The film starts off rather promisingly, with Jake Lonergan waking up in the desert with no recollection how he got there or who he is. Three men ride up on him and decide to take him in, and Jake completely kicks their ass. He then rides into town and after getting stitched up by the preacher (Clancy Brown), he does the whole “I’m the baddest man alive” routine again, so the film has this really solid, serious vibe to it.

But then the aliens show up and start firing and kidnapping, and we get introduced to our cast of characters that’s going on a rescue mission. Between Jake, Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), Ella Swenson (Wilde), Doc (Rockwell), Nat (Adam Beach), Meacham (Brown), and Emmett (Noah Ringer), there’s not a single bit of fun in the bunch. Now, loved ones have just been kidnapped so there’s no real reason for any of these folks to be all Shiny Happy People, but maybe we could have been given someone to lighten the mood. I brought up Richard Brooks’ The Professionals earlier, and that film provides a fine blueprint on how to do a movie like this; despite the seriousness of the situation, Brooks assembles a diverse cast of personalities to play off one another. There’s super serious Lee Marvin, but he’s offset by the charming roguish personality of Burt Lancaster. Here, we’ve got dour Daniel Craig offset by the grumpy Harrison Ford.

Would it kill someone to smile? Just once?

Now, despite all of this, COWBOYS & ALIENS is still an okay movie. There’s always something going on, so while I wasn’t engaged, I wasn’t bored, either. I didn’t hate where the movie was taking me, I just wanted it to be a better ride.

For instance, the group sets off and spends their first night in an upside down riverboat steamship that’s lying in the middle of the desert. It’s pouring rain outside and there’s an alien around. Dolarhyde has a “be a man” talk with Emmett. Meacham has a “be a man” talk with Doc. Jake and Ella chat. Then the alien shows up and you can barely see anything because it’s so dark.

The traveling group meets up with Jake’s old gang, whom he left so he could shack up with a woman he keeps seeing in flashback. She was a whore, which we know because all of Jake’s men say “whore” about 82 times. Jake engineers an escape, but then the alien ships show up again and before you know it, our group is beset by Indians. Then everyone teams up for the raid on the alien ship.

None of this is awful, but I struggled to find something to cling to as I watched the movies. The movie touches on the themes of family and what it means to be a man, but it doesn’t explore any of them. Dolarhyde has this big talk with Emmett about how he needs to be a man. He tells the kid that when he was a kid, he used a knife to kill an injured man who begged him to kill him. Dolarhyde even gives Emmett the very knife he used, so you’d think the movie would set up a tough moment where Emmett is asked to kill someone in the group.

Nope.

He just uses the knife to kill an alien, which he presumably would have done even if Dolarhyde hadn’t said anything about being a man.

The aliens are never developed as characters, so when the big final raid happens, it’s just humans killing aliens that all look alike and act alike. There’s one alien that has a personal beef with Jake, but he’s there and then he’s dead within a few minutes so it barely registers.

I’m not mad that I watched COWBOYS & ALIENS, but I am disappointed it wasn’t better.

DESPERADO: Bless Me, Father, For I Have Just Killed Quite a Few Men

Desperado (1995) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez – Starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Joaquim de Almeida, Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, Carlos Gallardo, and Quentin Tarantino.

DESPERADO is one of the coolest movies of the 1990s. I just reviewed Walter Hill’s Wild Bill, which spends a lot of time trying to be cool through style and editing, but DESPERADO simply is cool through the power of Banderas’ performance, Rodriguez’s energetic (but not headache-inducing) camera work, a fantastic score and soundtrack (thanks, Los Lobos!), and great performances that all blend together to create a very believable, hyper world of drugs, sex, and violence.

It’s telling that both films are released in 1995, where the old hand is trying new tricks and the new hand is reaffirming the old ones. I applaud Hill for trying something different with Wild Bill, but I’d be lying if I said it worked. DESPERADO, on the other hand, proves that Rodriguez can do with $7 million what he did with $7,000 in El Mariachi without getting lost amidst all his new toys and possibilities.

DESPERADO is a sequel to El Mariachi, with Antonio Banderas stepping into the role Carlos Gallardo originated. (Gallardo has a smaller role as Campa, one of Mariachi’s allies.) Banderas and Gallardo bring different qualities to the role of Mariachi. Where Gallardo infused the character with a boyish charm, Banderas gives him a much more traditionally cool, masculine edge. At the start of the film, Mariachi’s unnamed, storytelling ally (Steve Buscemi), enters Cheech Marin’s bar to spread the word that Mariachi is in town and to look for the local reaction when he mentions Bucho, the target of Mariachi’s quest this time around. Buscemi (I’m not going to keep calling him “unnamed storytelling ally”) gets the crowd’s attention by saying he just came from a bar where he saw “the biggest Mexican I’ve ever seen in my life,” signalling to us that Mariachi has grown quite a bit since he picked up Domino’s dog, hopped on her bike, and almost ran over a turtle.

Mariachi is now killer first, music being relegated into the stuff of dreams. He tries to play a couple times, but his damaged left hand (shot through by Moco at the end of El Mariachi) keeps him from being able to hold the neck, so first a little kid and then later Carolina (Salma Hayek) try their hand at accompanying him.

As with El Mariachi, it’s the non-action scenes that make DESPERADO something better than a solid action flick. Mariachi’s relationship with the young boy who walks around town with a guitar both humanizes him (when he’s teaching the boy) and then propels him towards greater anger (when he discovers the boy carries drugs in his guitar for Bucho), and finally shows us compassion (when the boy is accidentally shot during a showdown with Bucho’s men).

Where DESPERADO exceeds its preceding part is in not only Rodriguez’s growing abilities as a filmmaker, but in the extended cast of high-quality actors who are put to excellent use. There’s great chemistry between Cheech Marin as the bartender and Buscemi: “Hey, the bartender always survives!” “No, man, the bartender got it worst of all.” Danny Trejo shows up as a killer sent by the Columbians to watch over Bucho’s operation and take care of Mariachi. Forget Machete, this is Trejo at his bad-ass best as a silent, stalking, dangerous killer who uses throwing knives instead of guns. And Joaquim de Almeida steps into the role intended for Raul Julia and delivers a rather complex villain role. Alternatively, he’s mean, charming, scared, violent, conniving, generous … but his best moment comes when he’s trying to call the phone in his brand new car from his compound but he can’t because no one knows the car’s phone number. “Does anyone f*cking know the phone number to my car?!?” he yells to a compound full of henchmen that clearly don’t.

Rodriguez also shows he knows how to put together a great sex scene; instead of simply feeling perfunctory, Rodriguez puts as much attention to this scene as any of his shoot-’em-up sequences. Banderas is one half of the coupling and Salma Hayek is the other. DESPERADO is the film that launched Hayek into the Hollywood consciousness, and she’s rather good at being the gorgeous, semi-naive coffee shop/bookstore owner who ends up as Mariachi’s ally, nurse, and then lover. When Mariachi finds out she’s been allowing Bucho to use her store as a drop for drugs, Mariachi is furious with her, and it’s in these moments of desperate rage that Banderas really wins me over.

If there’s a weakness with DESPERADO it’s the ending twist of having Mariachi and Bucho be brothers. It’s not really needed but I suppose Rodriguez didn’t want to go down the same road as El Mariachi, with a bad guy who’s courting the woman who falls for the hero. That’s here, too, of course, but the thrust of these final scenes is between Bucho and his little brother.

DESPERADO is fantastic from start to finish, a slick, totally cool action flick that’s as good a contemporary western as anyone could want, and a fitting end to Western Month.

4 for Texas: I Also Gave Zack Thomas the Come Along

4 for Texas (1963) – Directed by Robert Aldritch – Starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Anita Ekberg, Ursula Andress, Charles Bronson, Victor Bruono, Edric Connor, Nick Dennis, and the Three Stooges.

4 FOR TEXAS is a dreary comedy that suffers, most of all, from both not giving us what we want (Frank and Dean together) and also taking interminably long to get to those moments.

The scene that perfectly exemplifies the pacing issues in this film comes a little more than halfway through the picture when we watch Harvey Burden (Victor Buono) make himself a grinder for what seems like three minutes. We watch him spread mayo on his bread. Then we watch him put meat on his bread. Then we watch him put another kind of meat on his bread. Then we watch him put tomatoes on his bread. Then we watch him put cheese on his bread. Then we watch him press the two halves together. Then we watch him cut the bread. Then …

Then finally Matson (Charles Bronson) shows up, takes half the sandwich, makes a few threats, and leaves. That’s a whole lotta build-up for not a lot of payoff.

Then we watch Victor after Matson leaves. He might take a bite of his sub at this point, but I realized that before this scene was over I’d have time to go make dinner, so I did.

Actually, I probably just made a snack, but the point remains.

I don’t mind that Frank Sinatra is completely unconvincing as a cowboy because he’s really more of a gangster than a cowboy. Zach Thomas “runs” the city of Galveston, always working some angle. Joe Jarrett (Dean Martin) is the new operative in town. They meet on a stagecoach as each outdoes the other in trying to first keep Matson from stealing $100,000 in cash, and then keep it from their new rival. It’s such … a … long … scene that it robs the film of whatever joy it was supposed to bring me.

4 FOR TEXAS definitely suffers from it’s pacing, but even the scenes that are here aren’t really funny or even pleasantly enjoyable. Thomas has a relationship with Elya Carlson (Anita Ekberg) and, of course, she wants to get married and, of course, Thomas is like, “Whoah, chicky baby! Slow down!” Jarret has a relationship with Maxine Richter (Ursula Andress), who owns a steamboat in need of repair. Because Maxine is played by Andress, you know she’s gorgeous, but Maxine is a horrible character, simply looking to trade her beauty and boat for a man who can come in and play “Master” to her.

Yeah. Jarret offers her a 50/50 split (he puts up the cash to fix the boat), but Maxine doesn’t want that – she wants Jarret to own the majority of their take because she’s European, which means (according to the film) that she’d rather be told what to do than have to think for herself.

Dreadful. But not as dreadful as the rest of the film. Sinatra’s acting style here is done in such a way that whatever he’s actually saying, what comes across is, “Hey, I’m ACTING here!” and Martin’s style is either “I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this” or “affable drunkness.” Which, being Dean, yeah, not totally surprising.

Unfortunately, the only really great scene in the film takes place at Orlando’s Restaurant, which is the only scene where Dean, Frank, and Bronson interact. At the beginning and end they shoot at each other, but here there’s a sense of personal animosity and confrontation between the three men that gives the scene some grip. Anita Ekberg is at her finest, knowing that Jarret is sitting right behind Thomas as Zack talks about him, but that’s the only scene in the whole film that feels like it has a purpose.

4 FOR TEXAS should be a breezy, fun way to spend 90 minutes, but they’ve puffed it out to nearly 120 minutes just by making boring scenes longer. The Three Stooges show up as deliver men to do a bit an it’s probably the funniest part of the movie. The rest of this film, however, is just too drawn out to be anything more than a mild diversion.