Dir. Jon Favreau, USA, 2011, 118 mins
Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde
Review by Carol Allen
Starting with two charismatic leads and a great premise – aliens invading the old Wild West – this film is all onwards and upwards from thereon in.
Craig is the lone stranger, who wakes up in the New Mexico desert in 1875 with no memory of how he got there and with a strange shackle on his wrist. He stumbles into a nearby town, which is ruled with an iron hand by Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford), a tough and by no means fair sort of sheriff figure. As is the way in the tradition of the western, the stranger finds himself not very welcome, particularly when it comes to light that he’s really Jake Lonergan, an outlaw, who’s big on the wanted list.
The town though has bigger problems to worry about. Strange air borne vehicles – a cross between flying saucers and Spitfires – are terrorising the inhabitants, lassooing them from on high like so many cattle and whisking them off to goodness knows where. But as Jake’s memory starts to gradually return and the significance of that shackle on his wrist emerges, he and Dolarhyde find themselves leading a bizarrely mixed posse made up of the townsfolk, Jake’s former outlaw buddies and a tribe of Apaches, who are also victims of the aliens, on a mission to save not just the wild west but humanity itself from the alien invader.
It’s a constantly inventive story, which skilfully combines its two genres with the help of plenty of action and a lively imagination. Craig is a strong lead – and my, hasn’t he buffed up since his pre-Bond days, when he was quite a wiry young man – and Ford growls nicely as his crusty co-star. There’s also an attention catching performance from Olivia Wilde in the “girl’s role”, whose character turns out to be a lot tougher than she looks and who knows more than the boys about the forces with which they are battling, and some good support from Sam Rockwell and Paul Dano. Rockwell plays the rather wimpy bar keeper, whose wife is one of the abductees and who finds his courage and his shooting skills in the course of the odyssey and Dano is Dolarhyde’s spoilt and petulant son. The film also presents the Wild West as the tough and vicious place it must have been in real life, while the aliens themselves, when we eventually meet them, are both impressively scary and repellently yucky. The pace never lets up, the resolution is satisfyingly explosive and this is overall a really good piece of cinema entertainment.
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