Movie Review: "3:10 To Yuma"

Damn, that Christian Bale is a really really good actor. He is one of those cats who reviewers say "disappear" into roles. He is every bit as convincing as a 19th century Arizona rancher as he is as the privileged scion of Gotham City’s wealthy Waynes or as a deranged killer yuppie. And in 3:10 To Yuma he is on screen for almost the entire film, working with another great actor as his foil. Yes, Russell Crowe is a really really good actor too. It’s easy to forget this when he makes such a habit of getting in fights because he’s insecure. Few actors working today can do bad-ass like Russell Crowe. Or more to the point, likeable bad-ass. Crowe’s character Ben Wade (that’s a great Western name), may be the leader of a trigger-happy, bloodthirsty gang of deadly outlaws, but you’re not really supposed to dislike him. (His bad-assness is established at the end of the film’s first action piece when he calmly dispatches one of his own men as punishment for screwing up a stage robbery.) The real villain of the piece is Charley Prince, Wade’s sycophantic, psychopathic lieutenant. Speaking of good actors, Ben Foster plays Charley Prince and many people wouldn’t even realize it’s the same dude who played Russell, Claire Fisher’s whiny loser boyfriend on Six Feet Under. The two roles are polar opposites.

Christian Bale plays Dan Evans, a down-trodden rancher who gets no respect from anyone. Predictably, someone wants his land to sell to the railroad and is trying to drive him off. Dan Evans is so desperate for ducats that for $200 he agrees to escort the recently-captured Ben Wade to the town of Contention, and put him on the train of the title. And that’s when things get interesting. With Wade’s deadly gang in hot pursuit, his captors go down one by one in a series of excellent fights and action sequences.

Meanwhile, the outlaw and the rancher engage in some good old-fashioned male bonding. In most stories, there is one relationship that is the most important to the narrative. In this film, obviously, it’s between Ben Wade and Dan Evans. One of the main themes of the story is redemption, and both men use the other as the instrument of their redemption. The rancher, tired of feeling like a coward and a failure, insists to the bitter end on doing the honorable thing and finishing the job. Wade, a stone killer who describes himself as "rotten as hell," decides to do the decent thing and help out a decent man. It’s almost like the relationship you’d see between the cop and the mobster in a John Woo movie.

The film is more than capably helmed by James Mangold, who appears to be what you could call an "actors’ director." Looking at his resume, he clearly likes to mix it up genre-wise, but he elicits great performances from actors whether it’s in a biopic (Walk The Line), a time-bending rom-com (Kate & Leopold), a gimmicky thriller (Identity), or a heavy-on-the-emotion drama (Heavy). In CopLand, he reminded a lot of people that Sylvester Stallone can hold his own around heavyweights with names like Keitel and DeNiro. Crowe and Bale have a good chemistry in 3:10 To Yuma, and of course the film wouldn’t work as well as it does if they didn’t. Crowe, as the likeable bad-ass, gets most of the best lines, but Christian Bale gets several juicy scenes where he really gets to show off his skills. He is extremely compelling in these scenes. They are the emotional high points of the film. I don’t often have the experience of watching an actor who is so good that I can’t look away. Especially memorable and affecting is an interlude right before the climax when he talks to his son and insists the kid take off before the shit hits the fan.

There are some people who might complain that there isn’t really anything terribly original in this film. That is actually pretty accurate, but it’s also largely irrelevant. Most of this stuff you’ve already seen in another Western. (In fact, you might have seen it in the original 3:10 To Yuma, a 1957 film with Glenn Ford as Ben Wade and Van Heflin as Dan Evans.) There are Western stock shots, like swinging saloon doors, peppered throughout. Many of the characters are from Western central casting: there’s an amoral local magnate trying to run the protagonist’s family off their land, an overdressed, prissy railroad agent, a bespectacled doctor, and a grizzled old lawman. But so what? It’s a genre picture, and it’s a really good genre picture. (The Western is perhaps the most American of film genres, so it’s a little weird that the leads are played by an Australian and an Englishman.) It’s got great action sequences, great acting, and plenty of genuine emotion. So what if it’s not terribly original? It works!