Starring: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner
Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood's new film directed, produced by and starring him could be described as "Nasa meets Peter Pan". If you're a boy at heart, you never grow old. Even though the outside says you're an ageing film actor, you can still fly.

This tale of four superannuated astronauts, endered redundant when experimental monkeys took over the controls in the run-up to the Moon shots in the 1960s, also deals in the American dream of getting a second chance in life. An amiable space opera on the surface, it's not such a simple film underneath. It's big selling point is the good-natured candour of Clint and Co. when it comes to showing age.

They are not the first stars to go wrinkly in public, of course. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford appeared as sibling horrors in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, on unsteady limbs, struck their old tough-guy attitudes in Tough Guys. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau entered into the post-stardom geriatric ward as grumpy old men. If affection is there, old age doesn't seem to matter. All such self-spoofing roles have to collude with the established image, tweaking it, but not tarnishing it or things go sour.

In Space Cowboys, it's Clint Eastwood's anti-authority streak (as in Dirty Harry), plus his can-do competence, that's given a self-deprecating makeover, but comes out tops with a kind of low-intensity macho conviviality as he recruits his team "to oldly go" aloft and repair a wonky Russian satellite that's as venerable as they are.

The film's first third is a round-up of such old fossils as Donald Sutherland, once an ace Nasa engineer, now a white-pony-tailed hippie building fairground roller coasters; James Garner, an ex-robotic whiz, now a preacher cocking an ear to the "sky pilot" from his evangelical pulpit; and the "baby", Tommy Lee Jones, a former navigator, now a stunt flyer giving teenagers birthday flips in his old crate and turning over their young stomachs in a rush of devil-may-care aerobatics. You think Space Cowboys is going to be a light comedy. So it is, for some time.

But once their space helmets go on, their performances become surprisingly flexible and the film evolves from a veterans' passing-out parade into something more dramatic, thrilling and slightly sinister. If it's space, there has to be a villain. Here, it's the ex-Soviet Union, whose obsolescent satellite conceals a secret that could leave a hole where the USA stands today.

The Evil Empire still: This post-glasnost view of Russo-American relations has left Space Cowboys accused (by some, though not by me) of using comedy to sow enmity, or at least mistrust among nations.

It opens with the image of a scorpion crawling up the leg of a dozing Nasa man, and getting duly dispatched when he wakes up to the danger. That's a credible metaphor for post-Cold War realpolitik.

Shot in Nasa's own backyard, Space Cowboys offers glimpses of training, work-outs, G-force experiences, lift-off and re-entry that sit uneasily with the old-geezer comedy, but give scope and even grandeur to the project.

Eastwood ingratiates himself without seemingly trying: His dry, hoarse voice asserts its owner's view without overt threat, but in a manner that suggests a Magnum 45 is in his locker, just in case. As a cheeky take on Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Space Cowboys is good fun and an honourable homage to old pros; it deserves to call itself The Ripe Stuff.

By Alexander Walker

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Space Cowboys - Movie Review