Thursday, September 6, 2007
Movie review: 3:10 to Yuma
Russell Crowe, Christian Bale and period-accurate firearms: what could go wrong?
3:10 to Yuma
In Arizona in the late 1800s, infamous outlaw Ben Wade and his vicious gang of thieves and murderers have plagued the Southern Railroad. When Wade is captured, Civil War veteran Dan Evans, struggling to survive on his drought-plagued ranch, volunteers to deliver him alive to the "3:10 to Yuma," a train that will take the killer to trial. On the trail, Evans and Wade, each from very different worlds, begin to earn each other's respect. But with Wade's outfit on their trail--and dangers at every turn--the mission soon becomes a violent, impossible journey toward each man's destiny.
Source: Cinema Source
Director James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma is loaded to the cistern rim with all the epic western trappings: period-accurate firearms, rawhide-tough characters, thrilling gunfight action sequences and gorgeous southwestern U.S. scenery (with Santa Fe, New Mexico and environs standing in for Arizona). It boasts dynamic acting powerhouses Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in title roles, with Peter Fonda in a hard-boiled cameo and Ben Foster as a scene-stealing, scenery-chewing, fancy-dressing fast-draw artist. Its script mines the rich tailings of an Elmore Leonard short story, made into an earlier movie by the same name.
In short, I anticipated liking the hell out of it.
Thus my disappointment when it proved to be lacking in that most essential of narrative ingredients: a brain. This movie is rife with muddled motivations, miraculous character conversions and missed opportunities for the straightforward resolution of events made unnecessarily complicated. Like an old western false-front hotel, everything looks splendid, but on closer inspection the top floor proves to be empty.
In what turned out to be a misguided attempt at "opening up" the story, scriveners Michael Brandt and Halsted Welles revised the plot so that most of the film's 117 minutes are spent chronicling the transportation of captured badman Ben Wade (Mr. Crowe) across harsh, deadly desert terrain to his appointment with the train that will convey him to prison, rather than leaving events claustrophobically confined to a Yuma hotel room - which device the 1957 film employed to thoughtful advantage. In this version we lose that pressure cooker buildup of tension as the clock slowly approaches the time when disabled rancher Evans (Mr. Bale) will be forced to limp the gauntlet of Wade's wild bunch to get the psychologically-manipulative outlaw to the train station and aboard his iron-bar accoutered first class coach.
Not to say they don't eventually end up in the hotel room for a spell, but this in itself is a prime example of the wrong-headedness of the events portrayed: why not ride the outlaw into town, take him directly to the damn train station and barricade a brigade of lawmen safely inside, BEFORE the rest of Wade's evil bastard road agents show up? Thereby eliminating the necessity of dodging countless improbably ill-aimed fusillades an hour or so later. I ask you?
Reeling the time-stream back a notch, there's a scene where - from the second floor window of the hotel room - Evans and his son William (Logan Lerman) glare down at Wade's lieutenant Charlie Prince (Mr. Foster) and his five murdering scum associates, who are lined up like fish in a friggin' barrel just waiting to be shot from their horses like proper stationary targets. In retrospect, might this have been the appropriate time to mutter something equivalent to "put your hands up!" followed a split second later by a percussive duet from the barrels of a Greener ten gauge? (Charlie has already informed the Evanses that they are walking, talking dead meat, so why consent to play by his rules?)
The film begins with a wild stagecoach chase that is thrillingly rendered; a dozen or more of Wade's gang pursue the coach in typical horseback coach-pursuit fashion, plinking off one after another of the armed passengers until the vehicle is immobilized and its contents sacked. It's during this sacking process that Pinkerton hired gun Byron McElroy (Mr. Fonda) makes a play and is gunned down.
Things look pretty bad: agent McElroy appears to have been gut-shot, and he's bleeding out rapidly into the dirt. Nevertheless, once the outlaws leave the scene (in the process leaving rancher Evans and his sons - who've stumbled onto the robbery scene - alive and breathing), he hangs on until Evans can get him into town and provide him with a semblance of medical care (the doc is actually a veterinarian).
Well, whatever horse remedies the vet uses on old man McElroy appear to work wonders, because overnight he's back in the saddle and serving as armed escort for the posse organized to take Wade to justice. Maybe more vets should stand in for human medicos.
All right - enough grousing about the plot. There are plenty of good things going for the movie, primarily in relation to the performances, which are fine across the playa. Crowe does a marvelous job portraying a charismatic bad man who could charm the hoop skirts off a fine upstanding rancher's wife such as Alice Evans (Gretchen Mol) if only he wasn't wearing chains and sitting across the table from a couple of armed lawmen. (Hell, he could probably have done it even with the chains.) Mr. Bale plays up his vulnerable side as a damaged Civil War veteran who'd have made a go of the whole ranching/family raising thing if only the rains had shown up. (But, c'mon, Dan - this is southern Arizona. Get a grip, man!) Rising above the outlaw rabble is Ben Foster's sadistic Charlie Prince, whose portrayal doesn't quite attain the level of Kilmer's Doc Holliday, but it's not for lack of sartorial affectation. And Mr. Fonda's Pinkerton man is pleasantly gruff and ill-tempered, as befits the gutshot among us.
It's nice to see shoot-em-up westerns getting produced again; if I've laid into this one too fervently it's because it had so much potential and took one too many detours off the road to common sense - not to mention Yuma. I've seen some great westerns, and this - alas - isn't one of them. Here's looking forward to the next horse opera out of the chute.
I GET THAT ALL THE TIME: "You ever worked for a blind Irishman in Leadville?" - Ben Wade to saloon girl Emmy Nelson (Vinessa Shaw)
BEGGARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS: "What the f**k kind of a doctor are you?" - Byron McElroy to Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk), while recovering from bullet removal surgery and noting the anatomical renderings of horses on the walls
BY WAY OF EXPLANATION: "Even bad men love their mommas." - Ben Wade, after getting the drop on a bad-mouthing posse member
