Space Cowboys (2000)

Clint Eastwood Movie #12

Synopsis: Old farts prove to the young whipper-snappers they’re still pretty ripe.

Blurb From the VHS Jacket: “Packed with an irresistible payload of heart, humour and heroics, Space Cowboys is all-systems go.”  

What Did I Learn?: Older, and even terminally-ill Americans deserve both our respect, and the chance to serve their country on the space shuttle... because they can be used for suicide missions.

You Might Like This Movie If: You love to see celebrities sent into space.

Really?: 1) So wait... the space shuttle just happens to also be named Daedalus? That’s a coinky-dink. 2) Hmmm... funny how the team’s appearance on the front page of USA Today is somehow considered to be a public relations disaster, and then they suddenly show up on The Tonight Show. How did that change of thinking occur? 3) I can see Corvin (Eastwood) and maybe Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones) getting sent into space, but it’s painfully obvious during the training scenes that Tank (James Garner) and O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) are completely out of shape, and have no business being part of the mission. 4) So, um... do astronauts ever formulate new missions, totally on the fly, when they’re in space?

Rating: I wanted to like Space Cowboys more than I did. While it’s fun to watch four talented actors share the screen together, the plot is formulaic and predictable (one of the cowboys is diagnosed with an incurable cancer – take a wild guess if he makes it home), and two of the characters aren’t well-defined: Sutherland’s O’Neill seems like a knockoff of Jones’ Hawk (both romance much-younger women at NASA, except that Hawk is a daredevil pilot, while O’Neill is a one-dimensional “babe magnet"), and Garner simply disappears into the woodwork. Space Cowboys is fine for a rainy afternoon, but it’s otherwise pretty “meh”. 6/10 stars.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186566/?ref_=nv_sr_1