Space Cowboys

Clint Eastwood might be getting a little soft in his old age, but after Unforgiven, all is forgiven. Space Cowboys has more grit than his woeful Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil but less than his underrated True Crime, and in general it shows all the signs of a legendary filmmaker taking it easy.

Eastwood stars as Frank Corvin, a former test pilot groomed by the Air Force as part of its fledgling Team Daedalus space program in the '50s. His maverick attitude makes an enemy of commanding officer Bob Gerson (James Cromwell), the inevitable bureaucratic asshole, who cans him. Years later, Corvin, a successful electronics engineer, is called on by Gerson, now a NASA bigwig, to help fix the guidance system of a Cold War-era Soviet satellite named Ikon (if nothing else, Cowboys has a knack for names) that's about to crash to earth. Corvin's price? He and his fellow Team Daedalus members -- Tank (James Garner), Jerry (Donald Sutherland), and Hawk (an underaged Tommy Lee Jones) -- must be on the mission. After more than 40 years, they finally get to fly into space. The newspapers refer to them as "The Ripe Stuff," but they edge at times into the overripe, with the characters barely straining beyond toothless stereotypes. It's a bumpy ride, but the opening sequence, a black-and-white flashback to 1958 of the young flyboys pushing the envelope in an X-2 that recalls Eastwood's Firefox, and the eerie finale that includes an uncanny homage to Dr. Strangelove make the mission worthwhile. As for the icon known as Clint Eastwood, his orbit is secure.

-- Peter Keough