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Beast meets West

A man wakes up in a dry, arid land. He's confused, disoriented; he doesn't know who he is or how he got there. He's approached by three sinister men on horseback. Their agenda is not honorable. Our hero - for, since he is played by Daniel Craig, with a stoic expression as rugged as the terrain, he is clearly our hero - springs into action and brutally dispatches the desperadoes with all due haste. He then dons a hat and chaps, mounts a horse, and rides to the nearest town. We're in Old West territory here. But then, there's the matter of that odd - even otherworldly - bracelet on his wrist...

This is "Cowboys & Aliens", director Jon Favreau's competent adaptation of the Hollywood-ready graphic novel. The idea of mashing up extra-terrestrials with the Wild West is as outlandish as it is inevitable. And the film, written by a team of genre vets (Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby) delivers on every ounce of its one-joke premise: you'll see cowboys fighting aliens. You'll get very little else.

In the town of Absolution, Mr. Craig's amnesiac gunslinger (talk about The Man With No Name) immediately runs afoul of both the local Sheriff (played with ease by Keith Carradine) and the local cattle baron (played with difficulty by Harrison Ford). Mr. Ford adopts his now-standard gruff voice and overplays most of his scenes. Mr. Craig, on the other hand, proves to be the heir to that elder statesman's action throne. The once and future Bond effortlessly holds the screen and proves to be a hero worth watching even when the villains are so uninteresting.

And that's the problem with "Cowboys & Aliens". For all the time the writers put into fleshing out the human characters, the other half of the title - the Aliens - are worthless. It's unclear why they jettisoned the comic virtually wholesale, but what we're left with is just another grayish-greenish CGI concoction of gooey eyes, bony arms, and undetermined motives. When the ETs swoop in from the skies and begin roping - literally lassoing - the locals, it's a bit of a hoot. These cowpoke are about to get a taste of their own hustlin'. Sadly, the script never capitalizes on this or any other of the alien's actions. They simply show up as the plot decrees and disappear (both from the film and from memory) just as quickly.

Along the way, the filmmakers throw every Western cliche they can think of at the screen. Some of them work - the boy learning to fight, the Native American vision quest - others fall flat (Olivia Wilde's mystery woman is too mysterious for her own good). Even the titular mash-up gets old - particularly when the humans appear to be so outmatched. If the film proves nothing else, it's proves two things: that the Western genre is still ripe for good story, and that this isn't one of them.