Skyline

"Don't look up"?!?  What kind of tag line is that for a movie about UFOs attacking Earth?  Right away, if the title Skyline didn't clue you in, that tag line is slap to the back of the head that lets you know that this movie will suck.  "Skyline"???  Is that the best they could come up with?  Just to prove how worthless whoever titled this film is, I'm going list roll a few better options off the top of my head:

• Blue F'n Lights - it's not a J.J. Abrams film, but it still fits
• Star Whores - probably a porno title, but since nobody could have actually liked the script, both terms feel appropriate...
• Underwhelming FX: The Movie - as an Illinois native, it pains me to criticize a special effects company out of Waukegan, but...why not?  They're so far north, they might as well be Wisconsinites
• Eric Balfour vs. The Universe - he needs to be stopped, and our world is clearly not up to the task
• Aliens Rape LA - my personal favorite

It's not like the term "skyline" has any importance to the plot, or (as far as I can recall) is even mentioned in the script.  Whatever, I'm over it.  There is one other thing I have to point out about this movie poster.  Look at the two guys on the poster.  It looks like they're getting ready for some action; one of them has a gun and appears to be sneaking up on the spaceship, and the other looks poised and ready to go.  This shot is taken directly from the film, and I promise you that the scene is nowhere near as cool as the poster might lead you to believe.  For starters, the guy on the left, who looks like he might be wearing a Kevlar vest or something, is just wearing a jumpsuit.  The other guy is holding a video camera.  They're not getting ready for action, they're getting ready to crap their pants.

Still photo of Donald Faison, mid-pants-crapping

All right, I guess  should get this over with.  Jarrod (Eric Balfour)and his girlfriend, Elaine (Scottie Thompson), fly out to Los Angeles to help celebrate the birthday of Jarrod's bestest buddy, Terry (Donald Faison).  The pair go way back, which is a nicer way of saying that they don't really see each other too much any more.  Terry has become a big time musician or actor or something along those lines.  I don't recall any specifics about his career, but he has money, a swingin' pad, a sexy girlfriend (Brittany Daniel) and a sexy secretary (Crystal Reed).  After a night of partying and some personal revelations, this fascinating look into group relationships is rudely interrupted by aliens.

...making everything earlier in the film completely irrelevant.

These aren't your ordinary aliens, though.  Well, they kind of are.  There are huge spaceships that appear to be disintegrating entire chunks of the city and sucking people into their core.  There are ground troops that vary capturing/eating people with smashing them into raspberry jam.  Neither of these sound atypical of movie aliens, but wait until you get a load of The Light.

Walk toward the light.  Pleeeeeease.  End this quickly.

The alien ships use a blue light (very similar, but far less subtle than the Blue F'n Lights of Super 8) to lure stupid humans to their doom.  Seriously.  The light goes on, people get mesmerized by it, and then they evaporate.  Or something.  Oh, and your skin and eyes get all blotchy.  That's probably important.  But it might not be.  So this assortment of civilians winds up being improbably important in humanity's war on alien scum, right?  Actually, no.  These people spend most of the movie hanging out in a penthouse, watching other people fighting the aliens.  And that's how the movie goes.

About par for the action scenes in this film.

This is a bad movie.  I wasn't expecting a whole lot from it, but I enjoyed the last effort from Colin and Greg Strouse (Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem) and thought this would make for some stupid fun.  There was plenty of stupid in Skyline, but precious little fun.

It starts with the acting.  I assumed that Donald Faison would be the star of the movie, since he has had the most successful (television) career in the cast and because I saw his interview on Attack of the Show several months ago.  I hate sitcoms, so I was never a fan of Scrubs, but he seems like a decent guy and I was interested in seeing him carry a sci-fi movie.  Well, he's only in about thirty minutes.  Looks like I put all my expectation eggs in the wrong basket.  Instead, the dreadful Eric Balfour is the main character.  It's not that he's a bad actor (although he is), it's that he brings down every movie I see him in.  Here, his motivations are asinine at best, his opinions are stupid, and his character is pretty unsympathetic.  Oh, and he hasn't quite figured out how to act convincingly against special effects.  Or people, for that matter.  Brittany Daniel and Scottie Thompson were a little better, but only because the story didn't focus as much on them.  Both women were unreasonably bitchy at extremely inappropriate times (like, you know, when aliens invade our planet), and sometimes their over-serious reactions to things were bafflingly funny.  David Zayas has a surprisingly large role for a character that isn't featured in the first third of the film.  He wasn't great, but compared to the rest of the cast, he looked like Lawrence freaking Olivier.

Special effects mean you don't have to act as much, right?

The ultimate problem with Skyline isn't the acting or the directing, even though both are awful.  The main problem is that the writing is idiotic.  This film follows a group of people who spend most of the film hiding in an apartment building.  From aliens.  Aliens that are destroying Los Angeles.  So, instead of focusing on people that are, you know, fighting aliens (like the not terrible Battle: Los Angeles), we focus on people who are hiding.  That seems like a poor choice.  And a boring one, at that.  I'm not saying that you can't make a movie like this, but it should focus a lot more on the characters and have someone that the audience can like.  In other words, it shouldn't try to be a showcase for special effects.  It's not too much to ask, is it?  Skyline provides an unsympathetic group of characters, has them act like jerks, and I'm supposed to give a shit about them?  Sorry, that's not going to happen.

I would have been fine with Skyline's terrible acting and directing if the movie had been fun.  It's not.  It's the worst alien invasion movie ever.  Well, okay, Alien Predators was a worse film, but Skyline is way less fun because nothing ever seems to happen in the damn movie.  To give you an idea of how dull this film is, it is a key plot point for the group of people to work together and put blinds over a window; they are not successful.  Just thinking about that scene is making me mad.  Thank goodness they chose not to give it a proper ending and left the door open for a sequel.  Ugh.  The only thing keeping this from zero stars is how hard I laughed during Donald Faison's last scene, and that was only because I assumed he was the main character.

Persona

Silence.  That's what happened for the first few minutes after I finished watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona.  The next thing I heard was the voice of Rodney Dangerfield in my head, saying "Tough room."  I love movies, but sometimes they confuse the hell out of me.

On its surface, Persona is a surprisingly simple story.  The famous actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), has had a breakdown of some sort and stopped speaking.  It's not a physical problem, and her psychiatrist doesn't believe that it is a mental one (which doesn't sound like a psychiatrist to me, but whatever...).  Despite this, a young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) is assigned to care for her; the pair temporarily move into the doctor's oceanside cottage, hoping that the peaceful scenery will cheer Elisabet up.  It kind of works, as she becomes more responsive and engages in activities, but she doesn't speak.  Alma makes up for that lack, filling every moment with her voice.  She reads aloud and thinks aloud mostly, but she eventually is comfortable enough with Elisabet to confide in her.  As the film progresses, Alma feels closer and closer to Elisabet, even commenting on how easily they could become one another.  Things don't stay all smiles and salted licorice for long, though.

No, things get eerily similar to a Calvin Klein ad.

Beneath the simple story lies a whole boatload of directorial intent.  You know the movies that critics applaud, but Average Joe flings his poop at?  Persona is definitely one of those. The film opens with a confusing sequence of shots; you see film running in front of a camera, a few frames of an old-timey cartoon (upside down), and then a series of images that appear only momentarily on the screen, including a crucifixion, bugs, and a lamb being slaughtered.  Then a boy awakes on what appears to be a morgue cart, and we later see him approach a bizarre unfocused picture (a focused version of which appears at the end of the film and makes more sense with context).

And then the film I described earlier begins.  Later on, at a key moment, the film appears to break, and we get more of that starting-the-film bit, with the cartoon making a brief reappearance.  Even later, a scene is repeated immediately after finishing, only with the camera focusing on the other actress.  This is a movie that wants to remind you that you're watching a film; instead of creating a suspension of disbelief, the director is deliberately distancing the audience from the film.  Fans of the theater might recognize this as an application of Bertolt Brecht's theatrical performance theories, but most people are justified in asking "What just happened?"  It all probably means something, but I doubt that anyone but the director knows exactly what.

Bib Andersson, after being hit in the face with subtext.

There are other high-falutin' theories that can help explain Persona.  The concept of self is definitely at the core of this film; Elisabet's doctor muses that the actress has sort of seen beyond the veil --- she realized that all interactions in life are performances of a sort, with even the most inconsequential exchange full of insincerity.  She opts to quit the game by not interacting at all; of course, this is just another form of interacting, one that the doctor believes Elisabet will eventually tire of.  Alma's character journey also plays into this; she gives and she gives to the unresponsive Elisabet, and finds that she is becoming more and more like her patient.

What's the deal with the blending of the two characters?  I'm not entirely certain.  You can argue that one or more of the characters in this film are not real, but that is A) really, really annoying to consider and B) an easy way for people to sound smart about the film and still be clueless about it.  I want to say that there is a psychological term for what is happening between Alma and Elisabet, but I haven't been able to pin it down.  "Transference" is the closest to the mark, but reading up on that theory makes me think it's not a perfect fit.  Regardless, there are some obvious psychological overtones in Persona --- one character talks the whole time on her way to self-discovery, while the other is patiently listening, like a therapist --- even if I'm not quite sure what they all mean.

They do not mean "sexy time."  I know that much.

Persona was directed and written by the famous Ingmar Bergman.  His stuff is not always the easiest to understand (Swedish language aside), and Persona is one of his most infamously obtuse works.  From a very basic point of view, I will say that this film is obviously very well-directed.  The cinematography is gorgeous, the way shots are framed is artful, and he got two excellent performances out of his two actresses.  Considering that one character spends the entire film monologuing and the other is silent, I think that is quite an accomplishment.  This is a film that was intended to be Art, and Bergman undoubtedly succeeded in that respect.

"Yeeeaaaaahhh!": the inspiration for David Caruso on CSI: Miami

I watched this on the suggestion of Juads Pato of No Bulljive fame and followed his interesting instructions: I found it on Netflix, but purposefully did not read anything about the film beforehand, even the plot synopsis.  I went into this one blind, with no clue what to expect.  That was definitely for the best.  Even knowing how unusual, interesting, confusing and frustrating this movie is wouldn't have prepared me for Persona.  Man, when I finished the movie, my first thoughts (after the Rodney voice, of course) was "How the hell am I supposed to review this?  'I don't get it' and then draw a large question mark?"  I often have difficulty reviewing movies that treat the format as an art form, but this was the toughest review for me to write so far.

It ultimately boils down to this: did I like it?  The answer is no.  I appreciate it, sure; great direction and cinematography, good acting with difficult parts, and a script that invites analysis --- these are all traits I look for in every movie and rarely find.  And yet, I was constantly frustrated by this movie.  The capital-A Artsy aspects were too abstract, too (seemingly) meaningless, and too annoying for me to actually enjoy any of Persona.  Honestly, I'm not shocked by my reaction, since I have a history of being frustrated by David Lynch's work.  Still, I'm disappointed.  If you removed the pre-title sequence and the subsequent Brechtian "remember, you're watching a movie" moments, I would have probably given this one eight stars.  Bergman's pretentious Artsy-ness just rubs me the wrong way on a very base level, to the point where I have found myself unreasonably pissed off at times while typing this review.  Thankfully, the good Art outweighs the bad Art.  This isn't as high of a rating as most fancy folk might give it, but it's a rating I can live with.

Hobo With a Shotgun

As you might imagine from the title, Hobo With a Shotgun is damned lucky it ever got made into a movie.  Sure, I like movie titles that give you the gist of the story, but this...it's a little on the nose, don't you think?  To help promote his Grindhouse project back in 2007, director Robert Rodriguez held a contest at the annual South by Southwest festival; contestants had to make fake movie trailers, along the same lines as the ones featured in Grindhouse.  If you missed Grindhouse in theaters, or have only seen its two movies (Death Proof and Planet Terror) separately, there were a string of hilarious retro fake movie trailers between the two feature films, usually in the style of 1970s horror movie trailers.  Not to discredit the actual movies, but the trailers were the highlight of that movie-going experience for me.  Here's Jason Eisener's SXSW contest-winning entry:

Regardless of your taste in movies, that trailer is awesomely funny.  Well, enough buzz grew around this trailer that they actually went ahead and made a feature-length version, only this one had a budget and Rutger Hauer, of all people, starring.  This isn't the first feature film to have been made from a Grindhouse trailer --- Machete was a surprise hit --- but Hobo With a Shotgun doesn't have the star power or the long-running buzz of its kin.  Is it possible that this practically straight-to-DVD affair is worth watching? 

Answer carefully.

Not surprisingly, Hobo With a Shotgun is the story of a hobo (Rutger Hauer).  He has been hobo-ing around the country for a good long time and has finally ridden the rails (as hobos are wont to do) to Hope Town, whose sign has been graffiti-ed to read "Scum Town."  Here, the hobo hopes to save enough money to buy a lawnmower and build a new life for himself.  Unfortunately, the town is ruled by the iron fist of The Drake (Brian Downey).  Under his rule, normal citizens are useless cannon fodder.  If you cross him, he will murder you in public as creatively as possible and get away with it.  He owns the town.  He owns the drug trade.  He owns the police.  He seems to own everything and everybody of importance in Hope Town.  This is obviously a town in need of justice, but who will be the hero that steps up?  And what will he use as his weapon of choice?  I won't spoil the plot twist for you.

I don't know if you can recycle those legs, but I guess a shotgun makes a convincing argument.

The acting in Hobo With a Shotgun should probably be taken with a grain of salt.  After all, the actors are acting in a movie about a hobo with a shotgun; this isn't exactly a British period piece.  Is the acting good?  No, but it suits the material perfectly.  Rutger Hauer has a lot of fun and his talent makes watching this movie one hell of a lot easier than it could have been.  He is smart enough to not over-complicate his character, and that helps keep this movie fun.  I thought Brian Downey was perfect as the MWA-HA-HA evil crime boss, and I liked how ridiculously over-the-top he and his sons (played by Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman) were.  I can understand some people who found them annoying, but they were the perfect foils (a businessman and frat boys) to a hobo on a vigilante mission.

A villain designed to make you want to hit him.  Perfect!

Molly Dunsworth played the hobo's only friend, a stripper with a heart made of...um...pewter?  She's nice enough, but I was looking for something less valuable than gold.  I think pewter works fine.

But really, what were you expecting from the acting in this film?  If you are curious about Hobo With a Shotgun, your main question should be "Is it watchable?"  Any movie with a title and premise as dumb as this one should be absolutely wretched, unless it is handled just right.  And I am happy to say that Hobo With a Shotgun was handled perfectly.  The best description I can give you of this movie is a blend of the better Troma movies and the first Robocop.  Yes, the acting is ridiculous.  As for violence and gore, well...there's some.

...and her day only gets worse.

Actually, there's a hell of a lot.  Lots of shotgun blasts, heads exploding, decapitations, and loss of limbs.  This is, at the very least, not a dull movie.  More importantly, this is a movie that knows how stupid it is, and is willing to play up to that idea.  So you think it's a little weird that a hobo decides to fight a corrupt town with a shotgun?  Well, what if he witnesses criminals threatening to shoot a baby in the face?  When your bad guys are that evil, it makes shotgun vigilantism both more plausible and more reasonable.

Manhole covers are underused in most movies.  Not here.

Is this a movie for everyone?  Definitely not.  It's dumb and it's gory.  It's also nearly perfect for what it is.  I loved what director/creator Jason Eisener was able to do with this kernel of an idea and hope to see a bright future for him.  Maybe he won't make great films, but he could definitely reboot The Toxic Avenger.  I can't really judge Eisener's direction because the film is so deliberately funny-bad, but I will say that he crafted a genre masterpiece.

The filmmakers decided to hold a fake movie trailer contest to celebrate the way their film got made.  Here's the winner:

The Hot Rock

Robert Redford is one of those iconic actors that I have, for whatever reason, never spent much time watching.  It's not a conscious omission, I just haven't happened to see his work; in fact, combing through his IMDb profile, I realized that I have only seen three of his movies that have been made in the last thirty years.  I mention this because The Hot Rock is not one of Redford's most famous films, and wouldn't typically be the movie someone watches to acquaint themselves with a Hollywood icon.  So, why The Hot Rock?  Well, I had access to it, it had Robert Redford in his prime, the director had recently made Bullitt, the screenplay was written by William Goldman (one of my favorite authors), and it was a heist movie.  Even though the film is not famous today, that sounded like a pretty good combination of things I like.

Career criminal Dortmunder (Robert Redford), literally minutes after he completes his most recent prison stay, is approached by his brother-in-law, Andy (George Segal), for a heist job.  It seems that the Brooklyn museum has a very valuable diamond that was once a cherished artifact for an unnamed African nation.  A representative of that nation, Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), wants to have the diamond returned to his people, but diplomacy hasn't worked, so he's interested in funding a heist.  Dortmunder is the master planner and Andy picks locks, but that's not enough.  They recruit a driver, Murch (Ron Leibman), and an explosives expert, Greenberg (Paul Sand), to round out the team.  There is just one small problem.  These guys are idiots.  What sets The Hot Rock apart from other heist movies is that the theft is successful, but also botched.  The plan is solid, and they execute it well, but there is a mishap that forces the group to fend for themselves.  This leads to more robbery attempts, which also work, but are also bungled.  To give you an idea of how goofy things get, the final robbery attempt includes hypnotic suggestion and the phrase "Afghanistan banana stand."

"People will remember this movie for what phrase?!?

How's the acting?  It's a little odd, to be honest.  Robert Redford does a solid job in the lead role, but he appears to be unaware that he is starring in a comedy.  He isn't acting as a straight man, he isn't playing anything for laughs...he's just doing a good dramatic role and occasionally getting frustrated at the incompetence of his coworkers.  It's an odd fit for a film that leans toward slapstick comedy.  George Segal is much more at home in his role, which plays to his strengths; he gets to whine, make comedic asides, and overplay some Jewish stereotypes.  I'm not a big Segal fan (I consider him a B-level Elliott Gould, who I also don't particularly like) and this didn't change my mind, but he wasn't too obnoxious here.  Neither Paul Sand nor Ron Leibman did anything too memorable, but I thought Moses Gunn was fine as the exasperated financier of the group.  Zero Mostel plays an important role in the final third of the film, although it isn't groundbreaking; he plays a dishonest lawyer with tricks up his sleeve.  While I won't say that Mostel was very funny or acted particularly well, I will admit that his tendency for overacting was more subdued here than in other films.

Peter Yates did a good job directing portions of this movie, but seemed less sure of his talents in other parts.  I thought the heists were all shot and edited well, and would have fit in a serious crime movie with no problem.  My problem comes from the comedic moments.  I don't think Yates has much of a comedic touch or a sense of timing.  Perhaps he was counting on William Goldman's script to provide the humor, but he shouldn't have.  This isn't a witty script; it needed help from the direction and editing.  Sure, the action sequences looked good, but the fact that the goofier moments didn't pack more comedic punch and Redford's apparent disconnect from the rest of the film detract from Yates' successes in the film.  And the whole hypnosis thing was out of left field.

There are only two screenshots from this movie online, and this was one of them.  Huh.

I was not expecting The Hot Rock to be a goofy crime caper.  That's fine.  I don't require movies to conform to my expectations...but this one probably should have.  The acting from Redford, the pretty cool heist sequences, and the general tone of the movie would have lent themselves better to a less slapstick film.  I think Great Britain agreed with me; the title of the movie was changed to a kookier one for the UK theatrical release:

While I may have preferred the movie more if it had been more serious (or at least less silly), it's still a decent watch.  I wouldn't say that it is anything special, and I completely understand how it has become a lesser-known work for all those involved, but it's a lightweight and inoffensive popcorn flick.

Cowboys & Aliens

If absolutely nothing else, Cowboys & Aliens has two things going for it: a title that accurately describes the plot, and a title that sounds stupid enough to make many people not want to watch this movie.  Take heed with this movie title; if you don't want to watch a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, then this is not the film for you.  I, however, happen to generally enjoy Jon Favreau and Daniel Craig, and I keep hoping for Harrison Ford to make up for the last Indiana Jones movie, so I opted to watch this sci-fi/western mash-up.

A man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert, wounded and alone, with no memory of himself or how he got there.  All he knows is that he has a weird thing clamped to his left wrist.  Oh, and he remembers that he's a bad-ass, because he kills the hell out of a trio of bounty hunters.  Our man with no name finds a name (Jake, as it turns out) when he moseys on over to the nearest town, Absolution.  The town is a washed-up mining spot that never had much luck with mining.  The town is still kicking only because old man Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) uses it as a base for his cattle operation.  This tends to put him and his men --- especially his spoiled rotten and frequently drunken son, Percy (Paul Dano) --- above the law.  Well, Jake publicly humiliates Percy while Percy attempts to publicly humiliate the local saloon owner (Sam Rockwell), which leads to Percy accidentally shooting a deputy.  Percy gets locked up, ready to be sent to the big city to be arraigned.  Jake is also locked up for apparently being a bad, bad man, even if he doesn't remember any of it.  When Dolarhyde hears about Percy's arrest and Jake being in town, he rushes home to confront the sheriff.  A surprisingly interesting battle of wills commences, until aliens happen.

Two plausible reactions to aliens happening

Yep, the titular aliens appear in flying machines, blow some stuff up, kidnap random people, and kill anybody who gets in their way.  This would make modern men scramble, much less someone from the 1870s.  I mean, it would make most men scramble, unless they happen to be Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

To broaden the appeal of this film, assless chaps were seriously considered.

Jake's arm clamp/bracelet comes to life around the aliens, and it is a weapon.  Not some wimpy weapon, either; he manages to shoot down one of their ships.  What happens next?  Not surprisingly, everybody teams up to take on the "demons" that have ravaged the town and taken their people.

The acting in this movie is a lot better than it deserves to be.  After all, this is a genre mash-up that, logically, shouldn't work.  It's surprisingly fun, though.  Daniel Craig does his scowling bad-ass thing again; I would have liked to see him show off a little more of his charm, but this is a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, so I guess deep characters are probably not on the menu.  I didn't love Harrison Ford in this movie, but I didn't hate him, either.  In the beginning, he does a pretty good job of playing a bastard, but his performance was missing a crucial extra bit to make it awesome; later, his character softens and falls back into Ford's more comfortable likeable-but-kind-of-gruff territory.  I would have liked to see him enjoy his mean moments more, though.  At least his hat wasn't too reminiscent of Indiana Jones, right?

Are they rebooting the City Slickers franchise?

Sam Rockwell has a bit part in the film, which I was happy to see.  It's not very impressive, though; he plays a weenie.  Adam Beach plays Dolarhyde's semi-adopted son/trusted cowhand and he plays it with as much intensity as you might expect from him; I really wish Beach wasn't the preeminent Native American actor in Hollywood, because his range shows its limits whenever he is asked to do anything more than read lines.  Here, he succeeds in keeping any charisma from accidentally getting on-screen by having his character's most emotional moment (him convincing an Apache chief to follow Dolarhyde) translated by another character.  Walton Goggins was fairly entertaining as a none-too-bright thief, which is just another notch in his belt of unsavory characters.  Keith Carradine was okay as the sheriff, but nothing special.  Similarly, Noah Ringer did a decent job of making googly eyes and looking scared, but his performance was not revelatory.  I did like Clancy Brown's character; for some reason, he seems less evil as he gets older.  I also thought that Paul Dano did a good job as Dolarhyde's insufferable son, who gets hurt just often enough to keep him from getting annoying.  You might also recognize Scottish character actor David O'Hara as Jake's gang-leading nemesis; he's a solid actor that looks mean for a few minutes and then usually dies like he does here.  My biggest problem with the cast was actually with Olivia Wilde as a beautiful stranger.  That's weird, since the kid from The Last Airbender is in this movie, right?  Well, she was okay, I guess, but her flawless complexion, clean hair, and super-white teeth didn't make her the most believable single lady in the Wild West.  I also find it interesting that no men hit on her in this entire film.  I don't ask for a whole lot of realism in my cowboys vs. aliens movies, but she stuck out like a sore thumb.

Where do you get your eyebrows done in a one-horse town?

This is Jon Favreau's  first directorial effort after making blockbusters Iron Man 1 & 2.  How did it turn out?  Well, I have to admit that Favreau could definitely make a good, old fashioned Western if he wanted to.  I was shocked at how engaging I found the alien-free Western scenes.  As for the movie as a whole, well...it's kind of silly.  Luckily, the title clued me in on that possibility, so I wasn't surprised.  I thought the action scenes were pretty good (seeing horses flying in the air is oddly amusing) and I liked how he handled the main actors and characters.  It did seem a little piecemeal, though.  Sure, that makes sense, since you are shoe-horning aliens into a Western, but a lot of the characters felt like they were simply tacked on (the Apaches, the thieves, Adam Beach, etc.) and didn't feel like organic parts of this story.  Favreau made the very best alien/cowboy movie possible, but there was a lot going on in a film that would have benefited from simplicity.  Hell, this might have been a better movie without the aliens.

Overall, Cowboys & Aliens manages to succeed more than a movie of this type (or name) should.  It is an entertaining blend of sci-fi and Westerns, where tough actors get to act tough and we see lots and lots of people get killed by aliens.  Seriously, it seems like a hundred people die, and yet there always appears to be about a dozen or so survivors.  I wouldn't call this a great movie or an unequivocal success, but it is fun and I always like seeing a quality Western, even if it is just in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.  I was hoping for greatness, though, and this film falls a little short --- primarily because the alien plot trampled over the cooler tough guy Western story.  Whatever.  I saw cowboys, I saw aliens, and I saw lots die on both sides.  The movie lived up to its title, at the very least.