Director: Jon Favreau

Stars: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford

Screening: general release

Rating: **1/2

You have to applaud the Snakes on a Plane-style genius of this film’s does-what-it-says-on-the-lid title.

Yerp, it’s a movie about cowboys and aliens.

As Western-sci-fi hybrids go, it’s sure to be the rootin’-est, tootin’-est movie about cowboys and aliens that you see this year. Which might not be saying much.

Daniel Craig plays a gunslinger without a past who teams up with a hard-bitten rancher (Harrison Ford) to lead the townsfolk of Absolution, New Mexico, circa 1875, against marauders from the stars.

Think War of the Worlds meets High Noon as Craig’s muscled man with no memory discovers the mysterious metal bracelet attached to his wrist can shoot the space invaders out of the sky.

He joins grouchy Ford in a posse to track the extraterrestrial intruders to their mothership in the desert, where they hope to free their loved ones.

The posse includes a preacher, a barkeeper (Sam Rockwell), a hot chick (Olivia Wilde, from TV’s House), a kid and a dog. As you might expect, not everyone will make it home for grits.

While this genre mash-up is clearly cool, it proves a bit dull between the bursts of shoot-’em-up/zap-’em-up action.

Instead of uniting the disparate elements in the service of a rollicking adventure, the film – adapted from a comic book – alienates by taking itself way too seriously.

Jon Favreau (the Iron Man franchise) has composed each frame as if it’s a comic book panel but his movie shoots very straight, with no sense of fun and too few punchlines to pepper the action.

For heaven’s sake, the movie has cowboys slinging six-shooters at aliens and aliens splattering green blood all over the place!

The special effects are dandy but surely someone is allowed to crack wise, Indiana Jones-style, after quick-drawing on a clawed beastie.