The new-and-improved icon lasted through four great films (Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire, A Perfect World, and The Bridges of Madison County) before Eastwood settled into yet another comfort zone, this time more as a filmmaker than as a performer. Content with adapting (but not enhancing) unremarkable best sellers (Absolute Power, True Crime) and using big-name supporting casts to fill their voids of plot, Our Man Clint had stopped challenging us once again.

His latest as both helmer and star, Space Cowboys, doesn't exactly represent a return to the Academy Award-winning form of five years ago: the screenplay does loop-the-loops around logic, for starters. But I dug this relaxing bit of corn, partially because it makes aging look relatively painless and ennobling even as it confesses the attendant drawbacks of growing old. Younger moviegoers risk feeling insulted by the film's depiction of elderly-baiting thirtysomethings; note that just about everybody in Space Cowboys harbours an ageist philosophy, however. Eastwood is patronizing the youth-obsessed in general, not America's youth specifically.

Geriatric Team Daedalus, a retired group of air force test pilots, is called back into duty when the orbiting Russian satellite Ikon suffers a major break-down--its mechanisms are so archaic that NASA's young engineers can't determine a viable fix. Frank Corvin (an unspectacular Eastwood), Daedalus' unofficial spokesman and designer of the outmoded technology, claims insufficient lead time in terms of teaching a crew to go up and repair it on his behalf. Skipping pages of exposition: smarmy bureaucrat Bob Gerson (James Cromwell) is forced to put four senior citizens, untrained as astronauts, all, on the next space shuttle.

Frank encounters so little resistance from his ex-teammates while first approaching each about the mission that it becomes an area of unexplored comedy: Tank Sullivan (James Garner) gladly abandons the priesthood (he's a forgetful minister, anyhow); Jerry O'Neil (Donald Sutherland), an architect of rollercoasters, drops everything instantly to rejoin Frank; and Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) quickly changes his mind after saying no, despite a long-standing quarrel between himself and Frank.

The generous camaraderie among this geezer ensemble (including the perennially untapped William Devane as a Flight Director) elevates their material, which in and of itself invites fascinating comparisons to Armageddon; I found myself not wanting the delightfully bittersweet training sequences to cease and desist, for they would naturally result in outer space scenes. Special effects have a tendency to devour a movie's human charms, and the bad news is, they do here, too. The good news is, Clint Eastwood approaches digital manipulation in the same practical manner he does camerawork in general, resulting in computer wizardry that assists the story instead of overwhelming it--a bizarrely achieved prologue excepted.-Bill Chambers