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The key to its success lies in the determination by everyone involved to play the damn thing straight. Even the slightest goofiness, the tiniest touch of camp, and the whole thing would blow sky high. But it doesn't.

While Cowboys & Aliens offers little in the way of sociological insight (except perhaps giving the white man a taste of his own resource-stealing medicine), it's still a ripping good ride.

Exactly what it sounds like: a cowboy movie and an alien movie thrown together, a genre mash-up that's more fun than good, but pretty good nonetheless.

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.

Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.

Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.

It's easy to like the cast - thanks as much to their previous work as anything on screen here - but with such a convoluted, illogical and dull story, no one fares particularly well.

Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.

Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.