- 8
...full-bodied, roundly satisfying...
—Peter Debruge Variety
- 8
...shrewdly blends an alien-invasion movie into a Western. 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.
—Kirk Honeycutt Hollywood Reporter
- 7
...will no doubt be popular and deserves success. As preposterous moneymakers go, it's ambitious and well-made.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 7
...the unlikeliest good movie of the year. The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 7
...boasts a killer cast...
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 7
...alternately slam-bang and sloggy, [it] is what is known in the trade as a genre mash-up. This mash-up is fine with me.
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 6
...has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 6
... 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.
—Nick Pinkerton Village Voice
- 6
The movie sparks to life every time [Daniel] Craig and [Harrison] Ford trade glances or blows, so it's a shame they don't share more screen time. [8 August 2011, p.36]
—Oliver Jones People
- 5
Favreau hasn't made a bad film, just an ordinary one, and you can't settle for average when you're dangling the carrot of Cowboys & Aliens before a summer blockbuster crowd.
—Sean O'Connell filmcritic.com
- 5
The title reads like a checklist. The movie feels like an expanded version of the same.
—Keith Phipps Onion AV Club
- 5
Dialogue is terse and predictable, and the sci-fi thriller portion is even less compelling than the Western saga.
—Claudia Puig USA Today
- 5
It's a setup for an epic showdown. What we get instead is drained of daring, much the way Favreau reduced Iron Man to formula in the sappy sequel.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 4
Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.
—Manohla Dargis New York Times
- 4
A handful of good scenes do not a great movie make.
—L. Thompson E!
- 3
...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.
—Nick Schager Slant Magazine
- 3
....a leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.
—Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times