Besides, it’s more fun to unpack Jake’s past as he does, in a fit of flashbacks and seat-of-his-pants epiphanies. The youth carelessly provokes Craig’s character, whose unflinching response indicates the kind of hero we’re dealing with.Įver so gradually, further clues emerge, revealing the amnesia-stricken Jake Lonergan as a wanted man and … well, anything else said about his origins would constitute a spoiler. Back in town, a dirtheap fittingly named Absolution, Paul Dano plays the tyrannical son of local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). He reaches for a bloody wound at his side and discovers a strange manacle cuffed to his wrist and a lovely stranger’s tintype photograph lying in the dust at his feet - and so begins the mystery of how this loner will come to save humankind from a battalion of unidentified, unfriendly and most unwelcome flying objects.Īfter the muddled “Iron Man 2,” this feels like a return to a more patient, more coherent storytelling style for Favreau, who finds imaginative ways to introduce each character before bringing on the alien mayhem. “ Cowboys & Aliens” begins like a 19th-century Bourne movie, with Daniel Craig playing a stone-cold killer who wakes up in the middle of the New Mexico desert, his memory a blank. (Besides, what was “ Raiders of the Lost Ark,” if not a prototype for such a B-movie mash-up?)
Abrams and Michael Bay), Favreau has emerged the most immediate heir to the master’s heartfelt showmanship. Still, of all the directors to work in exec producer Steven Spielberg’s shadow (including J.J.
#Paul dano cowboys and aliens series
A quick tour through Favreau’s credits reveals a helmer who has managed to spin hearty entertainment from ever more anemic sources - first a bedtime story (“Zathura”), then a comicbook series (“Iron Man”), and now a mere illustration, intended to be the cover of a then-unpublished graphic novel.