Clint Eastwood has had a pretty spotty directorial record since he won an Oscar for 1992’s Unforgiven.  The movie about the bridges aside, Eastwood has stayed behind the camera for two fantastic period films (A Perfect World and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) and directed himself in two modern-day duds (True Crime and Absolute Power).  So the prospect of the leathery legend helming himself in another contemporary picture didn’t exactly have me racing to get to the theatre.

But Space Cowboys isn’t too bad.  The film is about four geriatric, ex-Air Force pilots who get blasted into space to repair a Russian satellite that is even more decrepit than they are.  If you liked Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon volleying jokes back and forth about incontinence and false teeth in Grumpy Old Men, then you’ll probably love Cowboys.  Since they don’t even make it into space until the film’s final thirty minutes, Cowboys is more about the men training for their mission than the actual space undertaking.

Cowboys' first section might be its best, which is kind of odd considering the fact that none of the four stars appear in this part of the film.  The studio’s colorless logo leads into a black-and-white scene set in 1958, where two Air Force test pilots from Team Daedalus crash a $4 million X-2 experimental airplane (their third accident in ten months).  Young actors portray the near-ambulatory stars, who supply only their voices to this section of Cowboys, in which we learn that the Air Force is handing over the task of space exploration to the newly-founded NASA and their space monkey.

Flash to 1999, where old codger Frank Corvin (Eastwood) is approached by two NASA representatives that need his prehistoric expertise.  It seems that Ikon, a Russian communication satellite that was created using Corvin’s antiquated guidance system created for the Skylab project some four decades earlier, is on a collision course with Earth, and NASA needs the ex-pilot to tell them how to fix it.

Corvin refuses to help NASA unless they let his Team Daedalus participate in the mission.  NASA reluctantly agrees, and Corvin rounds up his old cohorts – maniacal pilot-turned-crop-duster “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones, Rules of Engagement); former navigator “Tank” Sullivan (James Garner, My Fellow Americans), who is now a Baptist minister; and Jerry O'Neil (Donald Sutherland, Instinct), a skirt-chasing roller coaster designer with Coke-bottle glasses who was a structural engineer.

Like I said, most of the film concentrates on the flock of fossils training for their big mission, and most of Cowboys' laughs come from these scenes.  It’s funny to watch them go through the turn-your-head-and-cough drill during their physical, and there’s a pretty good recurring theme in which the geezers find out that pretty much everyone they’ve ever worked with is dead.

Once Team Daedalus gets up into space, Cowboys turns into a predictable cross between Armageddon and Mission to Mars.  There’s the obligatory “I’m gettin’ to old for this” line, as well as a really creepy romance between Hawk and a NASA engineer played by Marcia Gay Harden (Meet Joe Black).  Both would have been better left on the editing room floor. It’s just plain weird to see the effect-heavy finale in an Eastwood film, but it’s handled pretty well.

Cowboys' script was written by Ken Kaufman (Muppets From Space) and first-timer Howard Klausner.  Almost all of the technical aspects of the film (editing, score, cinematography, production design) were handled by a crew that has worked on all of Eastwood’s recent films.  One surprising omission from Cowboys is the absence of the Steve Miller Band song that shares the same name as the film’s title.

On an interesting note, there’s a nineteen-year real-life age difference between Team Daedalus’ oldest and youngest member (Garner is 72; Jones is 53).  Even thought they’re supposed to be similarly aged, Garner was in college while Jones was in diapers.  The math gets even crazier when you figure that Garner, Eastwood (70) and Sutherland (66) were getting bossed around by superiors that were a lot younger than them (The Green Mile’s James Cromwell is 60, and Knot’s Landing’s William Devane is 59, but both played NASA men that were around back in ’58).

2:03 - for adult language and a shot of some really saggy old asses