The air is filled with flying bullets and the desert's thick with racing riders in this compelling moral drama starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.
3:10 to Yuma, a remake of the 1957 western of the same title, deservedly led the North American box office on its release weekend (September 8 & 9, 2007). It succeeds both as a classic fable of a man's search to give his life dignity, value and honour in an immoral world, and as a rambunctious Old-West-style shoot-'em-up.
Dolls Too Dolled Up to be Home on the Range
True, there are a few quibbles. For instance, the only two female characters to get any screen time at all (Vinessa Shaw as the bad girl and Gretchen Mol as the good one) were so dolled up they looked readier for a walk down the red carpet (or even a mens' mag shoot) than for a day on the range. And Russell Crowe's grimy five-o'-clock shadow ended at a perfectly-trimmed line just beneath his jaw. But whoever said a lawmen-versus-outlaws fable had to be realistic?
Of course we accept that grizzled old combat veteran McElroy (Peter Fonda) can take a bullet to the gut and return to the fray mere minutes after a non-anesthetized session under the unsterilized surgical tongs of the town veterinarian. And that certain characters can walk through hails of bullets without a scratch while others drop dead as soon as a galloping horseman wings a stray shot towards them across half-a-mile of desert; these are the conventions of the genre.
Bale Recalls Clint Eastwood
What elevates 3:10 to Yuma above the conventional is the pair of performances that come from its two stars. Christian Bale is reminiscent of some of Clint Eastwood's best roles as a crippled Union Army veteran who's trying to redeem his life by making a desert farm pay off. His struggle to maintain his own moral integrity, both for himself and for the teenage son who could still turn either to evil or to good, is intense and riveting.
Russell Crowe, as the almost superhuman outlaw who's being escorted across a perilous landscape to justice in the form of the 3:10 prison train from Contention to Yuma, gives one of his best performances in years – better by far than his acclaimed turns in movies like Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. With his twinkling sideways glances and mischievous grins, he evokes nothing so much as Orson Welles' Harry Lyme (The Third Man), an amoral trickster who'll stoop to anything and who can only be counted on to do whatever is least expected.
Writer Elmore Leonard Delivers Twists
Since the author of the short story on which both this and the original film version are based is the great Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Be Cool), there are plot twists and razor's-edge escapes aplenty, and the action sequences are over-the-top. But the essential core of the story is so solid that no amount of glossy trimming can spoil it. Ultimately, 3:10 to Yuma makes one wonder why the western genre is so seldom seen these days; maybe its release (neck and neck with the release of Brad Pitt's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) signals that the form may be seeing a modest rebirth.
