3:10 to Yuma

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Summary:
Ben Wade is chased by the Pinkertons for multiple heists of carriages transferring funds across the states (never mind the multiple murders). He's detained, and Dan Evans volunteers to help escort him overnight to catch the 3:10 train to Yuma. Complications ensue.

Review:
When it comes to westerns, I find most to not be all that appealing, but when they're good, they're really good. Yuma isn't all that bad of a western, but it also isn't the genius of film making that many viewers and critics seem to proclaim it as.
Mangold takes the reins with a sure hand, culling decent performances from his leads. This is the first time I wasn't annoyed to hell out of Ben Foster (Six Feet Under, The Punisher, Angel in X-Men 3), and that's quite an accomplishment. He's normally miscast, or reprising his whiny bitch-boy role similar to his character in Six Feet Under. Perhaps giving him a beard helps make him more believable as a committed underling to Ben Wade. He takes charge in his absence and relentlessly pursues Wade's capturers with a cool collective manner. Russell Crowe is not too bad, but when it comes down to him AND Christian Bale I can't help but feel that their roles didn't demand much of them. It's up to Crowe to be personable and intelligent, unlike the typical bad cowboy that comes from most westerns. It doesn't really spin the western theme around as much as the film intended, and I also think that pretty much anyone could have done as good of a job playing Ben Wade. Bale was good, but I think once again that skulking around and hardly cracking a smile or talking requires much honing of a thespian's skills. I hardly recognized Peter Fonda with that beard and long hair. He is a completely cliche-ridden and hardened bounty hunter, and even Wade himself at one point calls him uninteresting to talk to because he's predictable.
What did work rather well was some solid dialog. There were a fair number of humorous quips that were rather funny. One of my favorite lines is from Wash - I mean Alan Tudyk - about getting "a disease you'll never forget." (It's ok, you won't know the context until you see the movie.)
I was going along with the adventure easily enough. It was a moderately paced western with a few spurts of quick action here and there, and they did a commendable job trying to flesh out the main characters into something more than just "the good guy" and "the bad guy". In regards to Ben Wade, I felt he was a tad too nice, making the concept of him being a good man who isn't afraid to kill come across as somewhat forced. The point was to make the audience respect him, but the effort in doing so made me become more detached, because they tried too hard to tell the audience that "this is not your typical movie western bad guy." I mean, I get it, stop shoving it down my throat.
The most outrageous result of his ambiguous sense of humanity is presented at the film's conclusion. I hate reviewing movies that have their biggest faults in the end, because I don't ruin endings for people who haven't seen the movie. What I will say about this is that I do not understand the logic behind Wade and Evan's concluding sequence with them on screen together. Preposterous and outlandish might begin to define the feelings I had during this scene, thinking that one needs to finally draw the line at some point with Wade's sense of nobility. They tried so hard to have us respect Ben Wade, that in the end they didn't want to tarnish his image when it would have made a lot more sense to do so. It would have been a LOT better if they decided to conclude this movie by going into a completely different direction. Unfortunately, the final act of 3:10 to Yuma is the weakest, leaving me with the feeling that this good movie could have been much, much better.

3:10 to Yuma is overall a fairly decent western. It went out of its way to blur the line between outlaw and common folk, each side's sense of morals and humanity and how history can embellish to the point of writing a non-fictional legend, but this leads to the movie's ultimate downfall. In order to keep from smearing the good name of someone we might have ended up caring about, Yuma takes the realistic tone of the story into a fairy tale kind of conclusion just to keep the audience from hating him. It's still a good movie for those fans of the western, though.

GRADE: B-

Reviewed: 9/10/07