SPOILERS AHEAD if you’re no good at seeing terribly obvious plot twists coming from a mile away.

I wanted to like this. I really did.

I mean, it had a great cast (Han Solo! James Bond! The hot girl from House! Brother Justin! Zaphod Beeblebrox! The whiny preacher from There Will Be Blood!), an interesting concept (Cowboys? Aliens? An almost-nude Olivia Wilde?) and the script was (at least partially) penned by Damon Lindelof. Sounds like a successful mix, no? The end result, however, is just a muddled mess of a film.

I’ll start by saying that the entire cast was great. Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford & Olivia Wilde were excellent leads and the supporting characters were just as great. Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell don’t get enough credit for being great character actors.

Jon Favreau, however, lacks vision and the cuts are too quick and jarring for the pace of the film. His “style” worked fine for the Iron Man flicks because they were superhero popcorn schlock (albeit good superhero popcorn schlock). It also worked for Swingers because jump cuts gave it that harried feeling that I think might’ve been on purpose. But Cowboys & Aliens was trying desperately to be more than popcorn schlock, to rise above the typical summer fare. So why then all the stylistic clichés?

The script, which must’ve been good at some point to have hooked so much talent, was clearly fiddled with the entire way and in the end the story makes no sense. I’m willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the aliens’ motivations for coming to Earth. Sure, the universe is theoretically made up of the same elements everywhere so they probably do have gold on their planet and maybe it is super important to them but that doesn’t explain why they need to kidnap, dissect and loot humans. Wouldn’t an alien civilization advanced enough for interplanetary travel also have the means to just mine the gold straight out the of Earth and move on? Humans are unnecessary in the process.

And speaking of advanced civilizations, what kind of technologically advanced race will have developed interplanetary travel but not some sort of wifi-based kill switch for their little murder-bracelets? Hell, if someone runs of with my iPhone I can hop onto my laptop and brick it within minutes. You’re telling me that Daniel Craig runs off with their weaponized jewelry and they’re just going to let that go? I’m calling shenanigans on that plot-hole. Also, what’s with the self-destruct thing? Why would the bracelet thingy explode when it was exposed to the central hub? That doesn’t make any sense either. Who designed this thing, Microsoft?

I’d also be willing to suspend disbelief at the whole Olivia-Wilde-is-really-an-alien thing if it hadn’t been so glaringly obvious and if it hadn’t been so damn hokey. She’s from another alien race (not the antagonist alien race), fine. But how did she survive? And how did she manage to stumble across the antagonist race’s bracelet killswitch app? It’s not like there’s a schematic lying around, is there? She just seems to know how to destroy an entire alien vessel using a bauble. Shenanigans on that too.

So, in conclusion, “meh”. I was marginally entertained but I’m not going to bother watching it again unless there’s an extended, less hacked-and-edited version released on DVD down the line and even then I’d probably wait for it to show up on Netflix or Demonoid.