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83This movie, saddle sores and all, is a lot of fun.
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80A simple entertainment in a summer of overcomplicated disappointments. Also much harder-edged than you may have expected.
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80The key to its success lies in the determination by everyone involved to play the damn thing straight. Even the slightest goofiness, the tiniest touch of camp, and the whole thing would blow sky high. But it doesn't.
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Jul 24, 201180While Cowboys & Aliens offers little in the way of sociological insight (except perhaps giving the white man a taste of his own resource-stealing medicine), it's still a ripping good ride.
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75This midsummer crowd-pleaser from the ateliers of Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard is still a great deal more rip-roaring fun than, say, the campy movie version of "The Wild Wild West."
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75Take a cowboy movie, add space aliens. That's a gimmick that could easily have exhausted itself after 20 minutes, but director Favreau, a team of screenwriters and some well-cast actors keep it alive, and the result is a crowd-pleasing summer movie with more wit than most.
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75The movie is plainly entertaining, with a terrific cast and a fast-moving story helping you overlook the dialogue's frequent failure to crackle.
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75Director Jon Favreau keeps the tone light but, aside from the occasional low-key gag or one-liner, the humor is never allowed to upstage the more serious elements.
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75The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.
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75Cowboys & Aliens has without any doubt the most cockamamie plot I've witnessed in many a moon.
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75A hell-for-leather action film with a healthy serving of scares. It really is "Aliens" on the open plains, "Independence Day" for the nation's centennial, and what the movie lacks in originality and stick-to-your-ribs Western authenticity, it makes up for in pell-mell multiplex entertainment.
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70Exactly what it sounds like: a cowboy movie and an alien movie thrown together, a genre mash-up that's more fun than good, but pretty good nonetheless.
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63A film that is neither great nor horrible. Favreau does enough things right in Cowboys & Aliens to churn out a mostly enjoyable bit of mindless summertime action, just not enough to come close to rivaling his 2008 crowd-pleaser "Iron Man."
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63A loving throwback to the classic westerns and sci-fi adventures of yore, this celebration of two of cinema's most revered genres doesn't stint in lavishing their most cherished conventions with even-handed affection and respect.
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63Neither fish nor fowl (nor extraterrestrial), and that's a problem. Craig, handsomely craggy, plays it straight, and like Eastwood's Man With No Name, he doesn't have much to say.
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63That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.
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60Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."
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60Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.
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58Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.
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50That is what kids will come away with, together with a dose of wishful thinking: the vague belief that, with good will and a foe from far away, all those feuding parties of the Wild West - the cowboys, the Indians, and the no-good rogues - could have settled their differences and got along just fine. Go tell it to Gary Cooper.
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50Instead of merging the Western and the sci-fi genre to form some new, transcendent class of popcorn fare, Cowboys & Aliens just regurgitates the conventions of both genres. Double the high concept, quadruple the clichés.
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50Gradually, though, the movie sinks into ordinariness, serving up too many Spielbergian reaction shots of each cast member gawking or gulping at an alien encounter, and too many moral lessons that must be learned or taught.
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Jul 28, 201150Playing a variation on John Wayne's character from "Red River," Harrison Ford gives an understandably bewildered performance, often appearing uncertain if he should take his lines seriously.
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50It looks slick, pricey and starry – Indiana Jones teams up with James Bond for a gunfight with space demons. But even Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig can't save a movie that's all concept, no content.
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50For better or worse (and I'd argue the latter), the aliens are as monolithically evil, unformed, and un-individuated as characters as Native Americans once were in the earliest of Westerns.
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50It would have been nice if Cowboys & Aliens had come come up with the right equation to balance originality and homage. But in the end, it all turned into trigonometry.
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50The movie never makes much of a case for its own existence; it's a mediocre western clumsily welded to a mediocre alien shoot-'em-up, and if you allow yourself to think about its treatment of history for as long as one second, you'll feel insulted.
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50You want cowboys and aliens in the same movie? This one's for you. If you want anything beyond what the title promises, look elsewhere. And that means even anything resembling a clever mash-up of established genres.
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50Dialogue is terse and predictable, and the sci-fi thriller portion is even less compelling than the Western saga.
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50Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.
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45Based on a graphic novel, Cowboys & Aliens never quite transcends the flat dimensions of its source material.
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40An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.
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40Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.
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40The sole treasure of Cowboys & Aliens is that director Jon Favreau ("Iron Man") has fashioned an actual rawhide ride from a graphic novel (that took six writers to wrangle to the screen).
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40Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.
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Jul 24, 201140It's easy to like the cast - thanks as much to their previous work as anything on screen here - but with such a convoluted, illogical and dull story, no one fares particularly well.
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38Over on the aliens side, it's hard to make out faces, but there's no doubt about their place of origin: These slimy, growling, bug-eyed and distinctly non-scary things are straight from central casting.
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30A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.
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30Cowboys versus aliens is a concept that may make you smile in anticipation, but wipe that smile off your face before buying your ticket.
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25Every summer movie season usually has at least one spectacular, disastrous flame-out, and although the dog days of August still loom, I doubt there will come a big-budget blockbuster worse than Cowboys and Aliens.
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25Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.