With a title that just screams popcorn entertainment, Jon 'Iron Man' Favreau behind the camera, and the acting talents of both James Bond and Indiana Jones on screen, this has to be fantastic, right?
The plot:
It's the Wild West, and Daniel Craig's Jake Lonergan is a wanted man.
Awakening in the desert with no memory, and with a Predator-like gauntlet strapped to his wrist, Jake winds up in Absolution, a fading mining town that has seen better days. Having got on the wrong side of pioneering businessman Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) it seems Jake is to spend the rest of his days behind bars, that is until an attack squadron of alien spacecraft strafe the town, metal chains descending from the heavens to ensnare the townsfolk and carry them off.
Then Jake's gauntlet activates, and the fight back begins.....
Let's begin with a bit of a complaint.
All of the reviews of this I have heard and read seem to suggest that mixing the Western and sci-fi genres is somehow dazzlingly new and inventive.
Joss Whedon must be pissing blood from his eyes in frustration.
Does no-one remember the simply excellent Firefly, and spin-off movie Serenity? Or Westworld for that matter.
Anyway, that gripe aside, this begins as a surprisingly serious straight ahead Western, as the Man With No Name (sic) arrives in town and ruffles a few feathers and, it has to be said, it's pretty entertaining stuff.
Daniel Craig is excellent as the tall, handsome, hard as fucking nails stranger - seriously, you would not want to fight this man - and Harrison Ford is a welcome presence too as the crotchety, dangerously blood thirsty old fart.
Then the aliens turn up and things begin to fall apart.
See, this is a much better Western than it is a sci-fi movie and, frankly, the sci-fi stuff just feels like it has been added in for the sake of the gag title. It's almost as if they thought of the title, then had to figure a way to crowbar a plot from within it.
Though Craig and Ford get most of the screen time, the smokin' hot Olivia Wilde is a bit wasted, really, which is a shame as she is a fine performer, not just eye candy.
With a plot that peters out with a depressingly predictable special effects fest that goes on for fucking ages, this really needed tighter editing, as they could easily have shorn thirty minutes off the run time and vastly improved it in the process.
A bit of a wasted opportunity, then, and one reflected in the poor box office takings both in the UK and The States.
Disappointed.
3 out of 5
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