To say this movie doesn’t deserve a 1-star would be a bold faced lie. I won’t sugar coat it, this movie was bad. It had all the symptoms of a terrible movie: bad acting, terrible CGI monsters, drawn out “story”, and horrendous writing. It did, however, have its redeemable qualities. Now, don’t be confused by that. These qualities are not quality, in fact, they are so bad its laughable, but in the mess of the film they stand out among the garbage.
To start, the movie just jumps right into the action. The young, fresh out of college engineer (or biologist, or archaeologist…it never really tells us what she is except that she’s a frequent purchaser of low-cut tops) whom is prone to spouts of unprovoked anger, screams at the miner to excavate a cavern that is “geologically unseen before”. This is where the magic starts. After blowing a hole in the mine wall, raptors straight out of MS Paint attack a full squad of commandos and all the miners in the mine except the leader. No one seems to care that a gang of prehistoric beasts have just decimated an entire special forces unit, in fact, no one seems to know what dinosaurs are. The town itself is odd enough as it is. Set in Montana, it seemed that there were no young, single men available as all the early 20somethings were dating men twice their age.
The film jumps around from one character to the next, never fully investing an effort to explain who they are, banking on the hope that the audience will just piece it together later. The characters are so empty of personality and motivation that I myself was motivated to turn the movie off with each new character. I’m still not entirely sure who the movie was about. We have the young scientist trying to make a name for herself, her rich businessman boss who’s driven by greed, the town sheriff, the only black guy in the town, the young damsel, the hardened ex-cowboy back in town carrying with him a dark past.
Sprinkled in among these characters are unnecessary side characters that do nothing more than confuse the audience. For instance, the cowboy is in jail for a whole night and doesn’t notice or acknowledge his drunk dad in the same cell with him until the following morning. When he finally has a conversation with him, it’s as if the two barely know each other. Even the dinosaurs themselves were really unnecessary to the story. It wasn’t until about 20 min left in the movie did they make a real appearance.
In a movie called “Cowboys Vs. Dinosaurs”, you’d think it’d involve more, well, cowboys fighting dinosaurs. That didn’t come into fruition until the climax of the film. During this ending, is when the movie really shines. We get horse chases, shootouts with raptors, a dino-face punch, and an RPG blast that’d make Michael Bay happy. The movie ends leaving it open for a sequel. Something is telling me we won’t get one. The last uttered word of the film is the same thing I said once the credits rolled, “Huh?”
“Cowboys Vs. Dinosaurs” gets 1 Dino Punch out of 5.
The One Star Review 