INTO THE SUNSET
SPACE COWBOYS
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Ken Kaufman, Howard Klausner
With Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones
UA North, De Vargas PG-13 129 min.
There are 261 years of charm and experience at the core of Clint Eastwood's immensely likeable geezer-pleaser -- to wit: James Garner, 72; Eastwood, 70; Donald Sutherland, 66; and wandering in off the playground, Tommy Lee Jones clocking in at a mere 53. Tommy Lee is a very appealing actor with a face that looks as though it had been left out in the rain and sun to weather, but as we keep observing about the love interests with whom these guys share their cinematic beds, couldn't they have found somebody of a more appropriate age?
Together they compose Team Daedelus, a reunited crew that had the right stuff but the wrong timing back in 1958, when they should have been the first men in space. Now there's a Russian "communications satellite" that's coming apart and threatening to fall to earth, and there's only one man who understands its antiquated guidance system enough to fix it. That man is Eastwood, and he understands it because he designed it, before it was stolen and wound up in the Cold War hands of the Russkies.
There's no time to train buff youngsters. Clint will have to go up himself. And the only way he'll do that is with his old Team Daedelus buddies. When project director James Cromwell objects, Eastwood tells him to take it or leave it. "The clock's ticking," he growls, "and I'm not getting any younger."
What makes this movie so much fun is not just the Team Methuselah fantasy of four old guys showing they can still cut it with the young stallions. It's the guys themselves. In our disposable society, it is surpassingly great to see guys like Garner and Sutherland deliver the goods. When a NASA scientist (Marcia Gay Harden, with a hairdo patterned on the Liberty Bell) asks what she should call them, Sutherland replies with a twinkling leer "You can call me.anytime." It's not a fresh line, but Sutherland serves it up like steak tartare.
Eastwood opens with a black-and-white sequence as four young actors (voices dubbed by the older stars) take us back to the days of '58. Then, like Dorothy landing in Oz, we burst into color as the present-day Clint accepts his assignment and proceeds, in the time-honored Dirty Dozen/Magnificent Seven tradition, to round up his geriatric compadres from their current walks of life. We follow them through NASA training, and finally blast off with them on the mission. At this point the plot thickens, the technology quickens, and the movie takes on the feel of another space adventure - and an entertaining one at that. But where it earns its stripes is on the ground as it revels in the sly, understated craft of its all-star team of old pros.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews