Cowboys & Aliens delivers what it promises

Cowboys & Aliens (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Jon Favreau. Starring Daniel Craig,

Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde.

Sci-fi action movie that takes a good idea and runs with it.

Cowboys & Aliens' dead serious tone might come as a surprise given its campy title, but it was the right approach for the film. Plenty of promising movies have drowned in self-referential humor and overblown action because they were afraid to play it straight.

Speaking of the title-it's to the point, I'll give it that. There are cowboys in this movie, let there be no doubt about it. And aliens? Oh, you better believe it's got aliens. If there were any more aliens in this thing they'd be showing it on The History Channel.

There are little nods to the setting that give the movie charm. I'm fond of the way the aliens are made up to be a little more low-tech than your standard space invaders, as though they're going through their own Old West period; they fly in conventional rockets and jets not much removed from today's technology, they abduct people with ropes instead of light beams, and they share humanity's lust for gold.

The plot is straightforward and goes something like this: a bandit with no memory (Daniel Craig), a ruthless cattleman (Harrison Ford), and a mysterious traveler (Olivia Wilde) hunt down aliens who have been abducting people from the American Old West.

It's a great premise, and a nearly perfect execution. All of the wondrous images that the concept sparks in your imagination are translated onto the screen. Rounding up a posse to track a wounded alien through the desert? Check. Chasing down a flying saucer on a horse? Check. Gunslinger getting his hands on advanced alien weaponry? That's a check.

But it's this same dependability that keeps the film from being something truly exceptional. There isn't much more to it than the logical assembly of the conventions of its two sub-genres. This is the kind of story that writes itself, and the authors were content with letting it do that. As a result, it doesn't have a lot of personality. It gives the sense that it could have been made by any capable creative team.

It may not be a classic, but it's easy to recommend.

Rated PG-13 for asymmetrical warfare.
4 out of 5

Mr. Popper's Penguins (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Mark Waters. Starring Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Angela Lansbury.

Family comedy somewhat less terrible than it looks.

Mr. Popper (Jim Carrey) is a big shot corporate something-or-other who receives a crate of penguins from Antarctica in a mail delivery mix-up. After deciding to keep them, he is assailed by the most implausible villain in history: a zookeeper who dares suggest a zoo enclosure might be a better place for penguins than a condo with the heat turned off.

Popper also has part-time custody of two kids who don't get along with him so that the movie can sell a message about family togetherness. But considering how quickly the kids warm to him when they see the penguins, and how quickly they turn on him once they're gone, I would argue that the true moral of the story is "Buy your children's love with penguins."

Carrey's character-a slick businessman divorced from his wife and too preoccupied with himself to build a relationship with his young son-is essentially a cut-and-paste of the guy he played back in 1997's Liar, Liar. I choose to believe they're one and the same: that shortly after Liar, Liar's warm and fuzzy ending, he abandoned his family, changed his name, and started his twisted life over in a new city.

And Mr. Popper's Penguins certainly resembles the kinds of movies Jim Carrey was making in the 90s-at a glance, it looks almost like a sad parody of them.

But in the 90s, at least, they would have used real penguins. That's right-you may be surprised to learn that this film about penguins contains barely a glimpse of a real live penguin. Nearly every shot uses not-so-convincing computer animated models in their place.

I have two problems with this. First, a cutesy animal movie with no actual cutesy animals is a useless blight on the world. Second, it encourages exactly the kind of lazy, lamebrained writing that saturates this movie. When real animals are used in a film, they have to act like animals; they don't have much choice. But the animated penguins in Mr. Popper's Penguins act like humans. They have human personalities, human feelings, and human body language. Nobody wants to watch a movie about Jim Carrey hanging out with a bunch of tiny people acting like people, or they'd have made it Mr. Popper's Pygmies.

This is not a good movie. But it's difficult to summon up the hatred it seems so intent on cultivating for itself because it succeeds at being funny on too many occasions to chalk up to a statistical anomaly. Carrey is still a talented comic actor, and he gets the spotlight more than the penguins do.

Rated PG for aggressive honking.
2.5 out of 5