The movie is careful not to demonise them, and in fact makes a big deal of making Jake beat up some bad, nasty white cowboys who have severed scalps on their belts. Native Americans are given a number of reasonable roles. Of course it's actually Cowboys & Indians & Aliens.
But that bracelet, and various fuzzy flashbacks, give Jake the awful feeling that he has in fact already been kidnapped, experimented upon and dropped back on to the burning scrub. So Jake and Woodrow have to saddle up, organise a posse and get their six-guns at the ready to take on these darned inter-planetary interlopers. But Percy has been kidnapped, along with many other townspeople, by a bunch of extra-terrestrial varmints with slurpy tentacles and fancy bleeping spaceships. Jake is to join forces with a cantankerous, aggressive old cattle-magnate called Woodrow Dolarhyde, played by Harrison Ford, who has cause to hate Jake for beating up his no-good son Percy (Paul Dano). In 1875, an escaped outlaw called Jake Lonergan, played by Daniel Craig with a perpetual, lemon-sucking facial expression, finds himself waking up in the middle of the desert with no memory, and a weird metal bracelet clamped around his wrist. Something that might have been frankly better left as a throwaway joke, or a doodle on an executive's notepad, has actually made it through the system as a full-length feature film, directed with a not-very-light touch by Jon Favreau. We flinched we winced we watched as the terrible Wild-West-plus-sci-fi idea crashed and burned spectacularly, and the pure wood performances of Kevin Kline and Will Smith went up in smoke.Ī roughly similar nightmare has now arisen. M any of us had to live through the dark, dark days of Wild, Wild West, Barry Sonnenfeld's mash-up retro-futurist Western from 1999.