# Space Cowboys (2000)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

SPACE COWBOYS (Warner Bros.) Starring: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner, James Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden, William Devane, Loren Dean. Screenplay: Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner. Producers: Andrew Lazar and Clint Eastwood. Director: Clint Eastwood. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 130 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

SPACE COWBOYS will be greeted with enthusiasm in a certain demographic group simply because it dares to suggest that Americans over the age of 60 exist. That's a fairly revolutionary notion in pop culture, most of which is targeted at an audience that still gets graded in "nap-time" and "scissors." It's also a rare opportunity for veteran actors to get work in major roles, so you can't blame anyone involved for being enthusiastic about the project, especially given its themes. It's fun to watch a film like SPACE COWBOYS -- and probably even more fun for those viewers in the stars' peer group -- because the film itself could be an example of what its protagonists are trying to demonstrate: Sometimes, wisdom and experience trump washboard abs.

Clint Eastwood has been around the block a few times in Hollywood, so you'd think that his experience would teach him the difference between a good idea and a good script. Unfortunately, as he has done in most of his recent films, he settles for the former. The story opens in 1958, where the four members of the U.S. Air Force's Team Daedalus are preparing to be the first men in space. NASA and a chimp usurp their place, however, robbing them of their chance for space travel. But 42 years later, NASA comes calling on Frank Corvin (Eastwood) when a Russian satellite with a guidance system he designed is about to plummet to earth. The mission requires in-orbit attention, and Frank takes advantage of his bargaining position by insisting that his original team be allowed to join him for the flight. And so Team Daedalus is re-united: master pilot "Hawk" Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones), engineer Jerry O'Neil (Donald Sutherland) and navigator Tank Sullivan (James Garner).

There's more than a little bit of GRUMPY OLD ASTRONAUTS to SPACE COWBOYS, with screenwriters Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner taking advantage of time-worn senior citizen incongruities. Hawk and Frank are still feisty enough to get into fistfights (chortle); Jerry is still a skirt-chaser, even with his telescope-lens glasses (hoot); a female doctor walks in to examine our drooping, totally nude heroes (big-time guffaw). It's cheap humor, but it's still amusing because the performers seem dignified even when they're doing silly things, and because everyone seems to be having so much fun doing it. They also get a chance to turn the tables and mock the cocky younger astronauts (Loren Dean and Courtney B. Vance) on their mission, a development always good for a round of applause. In any other outer space adventure, the hour-plus wait for the astronauts to get off the ground would be excruciating. Eastwood makes the Daedalus team's detailed training regimen a chance to let his gifted NASA-meets-AARP stars flaunt their ease in front of the camera.

Then the astronauts finally do get off the ground, and SPACE COWBOYS crashes to earth. It's bad enough that once the Daedalus mission is underway, the good humor and cameraderie of the training center sequences vanishes, leaving nothing but crisis resolution-based plotting. Worse still is the mission itself, a ridiculous "surprise" that would have been evident even if Eastwood hadn't filmed certain characters with ominous slow-zoom close-ups to signal their soon-to-be-revealed villainy. Eastwood doesn't even seem interested in the entire third act, racing through the events at such a frantic pace (particularly for the usually meandering director) that you may wonder if he was running out of film. More likely, he understands that once the entertaining interplay between the actors gives way to shaky-cam explosions, there's not much reason to wait before sprinting toward the credits.

SPACE COWBOYS builds up enough good will through its first 80 minutes to carry it over the massive hump of its lame conclusion. Eastwood is still one of the most uniquely evocative visual film-makers around -- a director generally willing to linger where other directors would cut -- which generally makes his films worth experiencing. His style also makes him a uniquely appropriate choice for a film about characters that have reached the point in life where they'd rather amble than run. SPACE COWBOYS ambles right along with Eastwood, Jones, Sutherland and Garner, right up to the point where they amble into the conclusion of a generic summer action film. This kind of veteran acting talent deserves better. Wisdom and experience should tell someone like Clint Eastwood that there's plenty of kids' stuff out there without trying to make him and his co-stars part of it.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 codgers, over and out:  6.

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