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Okay, who wants to volunteer to tell Clint Eastwood he’s doing things all wrong? In the eight years since Unforgiven, which is hands-down the best horse opera, as well as one of the best films of any stripe, ever, he’s only had one movie that could be called an unqualified success, The Bridges of Madison County. And that was only because he had star power to buy film rights to a book that had more copies in print, and was less challenging to read, than Green Eggs and Ham. With last year’s True Crime, his starring/directing resume now includes what even my mom agrees is one of the worst movies in recent memory. And now this. What happened?
For starters, he shouldn’t have trusted the screenwriting chores for a movie ostensibly aimed at older audiences, that has to do with four sexagenarians flying a NASA mission to rescue an equally outdated satellite, to the guy who wrote Muppets in Space.
In the shadowy b&w prologue sequence of Space Cowboys, we get a bunch of revisionist aerospace history that states four Air Force guys in something called Project Daedalus were on the verge of flying rocket planes into orbit in 1958 until Eisenhower decided to put a chimp atop a ballistic missile instead. (Personally, I would have fired Frank, Hawk, Tank, and Jerry too -- not just because two of them had silly nicknames, but because whenever one of these hotshot young jet-jockeys moved his intentionally blurred mouth, the voice of Clint, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, or Donald Sutherland came out, which undoubtedly spooked their co-workers to no end.)
Forty years later, Frank gets a call from NASA about an 80s-era Soviet communications satellite that’s about to come crashing down, which somehow sports the guidance system he designed in 1970 that nobody knows how to repair now. In exchange for his help, Frank gets NASA to let the original quartet can fly the mission, giving them not only the opportunity to finally get into space, but to make their pedantic former commander (James Cromwell) eat crow.
Sounds easy, but when Frank sets out to round everyone up, the reality of the situation is more daunting. Hawk (Jones) is now a Yeageresque gonzo crop-duster who still has 20/10 vision, but Tank (Garner) is a forgetful, almost doddering Baptist minister, while Jerry (Sutherland) is a rollercoaster-designing lothario more interested in poontang than Prune Tang. With such an assemblage, all they needed was a blind midget Latina boxer to handle the last few demographics left uncovered. But they somehow pass the physical, fall in love, have a bar brawl, get cancer, uncover a nuclear plot, upstage the whippersnappers, and fly to the moon, all in less than two hours. No lie.
This is what happens when you take a writer who’s been telling Fozzie Bear when to “wucka wucka” and ask him to concoct growls for Clint from bits and pieces of The Right Stuff, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Lethal Weapon, and Star Wars. Space Cowboys careens into the most poorly paced, confusing, unlikely finale I can ever remember seeing in a movie, and would have deserved a failing grade except that it did assemble a nice, if largely underutilized, cast, and has one funny line about Alan Shepherd.
Clint should have rented the cast of Coyote Ugly from Jerry Bruckheimer and shot Space Cowgirls instead. D+
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