Aliens abduct astonished townspeople in the Old West! A mysterious amnesiac gunslinger rides to the rescue! Extraterrestrials get lassoed and blown to bits in cool-looking ways! What’s not to like?
Western/sci-fi mash-up “Cowboys & Aliens” also boasts a killer cast: steely-eyed Daniel Craig as the gunslinger, grumpy Harrison Ford as a cruel cattle baron and sexy Olivia Wilde (of TV’s “House”) as a mysterious beauty who joins them in battling the murderous ETs.
It’s not quite “The Searchers” meets “Close Encounters,” as advertised, but by playing its genres straight, this midsummer crowd-pleaser from the ateliers of Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard is still a great deal more rip-roaring fun than, say, the campy movie version of “The Wild Wild West.”
The generic extraterrestrials may look strikingly like ancestors of those in the Spielberg-produced “Super 8,” and treat their abductees in a remarkably similar fashion that just skirts the limit of the PG-13 rating.
But on the other hand, this sharp-looking, committee-written adaptation of a genre-splicing graphic novel wins points by frequently, smartly and affectionately tipping its hat to classic Westerns and their archetypes.
Jon Favreau can be an uneven director (witness the two “Iron Man” movies), but here he does a great and economical job sketching out Absolution, a tough and struggling frontier town in the Arizona Territory, in 1875.
The nameless gunslinger (Craig) is trying to figure out who he is and why he has a chest wound and a strange-looking shackle on his wrist. Still, he’s got two lightning fists and is sure quick on the trigger, as the cattle baron’s wastrel son Percy (Paul Dano) quickly finds out when he unwisely tries to pick a barroom brawl with our hero.
Percy ends up accidentally shooting a hapless deputy (played by John Wayne’s grandson, Brendan Wayne, no less), obliging the grizzled sheriff (Keith Carradine) to take both Percy and the gunslinger — who is wanted for a stagecoach robbery — into custody.
But before they can be shipped off to a federal lockup, a 16-winged extraterrestrial spaceship swoops into Absolution, abducting Percy and the wife of the timid saloon keeper (Sam Rockwell) among others.
The abduction does not please Percy’s dad, Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford) who loves Perrcy more than Nat (Adam Beach), his fiercely loyal Native American adopted son. A Civil War veteran, the colonel is enough of a strategist to figure out that the Gunslinger’s shackle — which turns out to be a sci-fi blaster — is a far more effective weapon against the invaders than your average six-shooter.
The gunslinger and the colonel join forces with the sheriff, the saloon keeper, a taciturn preacher (Clancy Brown) and the latter’s demographicallyfriendly young grandson (Noah Ringer of “The Last Airbender”).
Wilde’s mysterious Ella — let’s just say she has access to many secrets of the universe, including waterproof mascara — brings a tribe of hostile Indians as well as the gunslinger’s former bandit-colleagues into the big tent of this rather unlikely posse.
The film’s climax is a lengthy — maybe a tad too lengthy — attack on the extraterrestrials’ fort-like spaceship amid the mesas, a rather cool-looking if improbable mash-up of Mayan, steampunk and brutalist styles.
Colonel Dolarhyde’s tactics are strictly old school, but the gunslinger has somehow acquired knowledge of what look suspiciously like 20th-century commando skills.
“Cowboys and Aliens” moves fleetly enough that most of the myriad questions the script raises didn’t occur to me until afterward. In the meantime, as pure period escapism it’s yards ahead of competition like the dullish “Captain America.” The hand-picked cast here really does help.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com