Cowboys & Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011)

A Jon Favreau product tends to do exactly what it says on the tin, but it would have been nice if there had actually been a layer of irony behind this particular title, instead of nothing more than a Western with gunslingers being terrorised by sub-Alien critters. A crisis of religious faith brought on by the paranormal events could have been one avenue, all-out B-movie hijinks in the style of Tremors another. Instead, Favreau goes for somewhere in between and ends up with a splattered blancmange, not deep, exciting, or, as the last resort, funny. Daniel Craig's mean hombre accent wanders all over the territory, Harrison Ford's character has to swing from hoary bastard cattle baron to heart-of-gold action pappy before we get a chance to hate him and undermine his cemented box-office hero status, and the sci-fi component just means an opportunity for fiery FX. It embarrassingly falls short of even its very modest ambitions.

3/10