3:10 to Yuma (Mangold, 2007)IMDB LinkI do not want to be too hard on “3:10 to Yuma”, because I just recently saw “The Proposition”, and it destroys “3:10 to Yuma” on every level, that it is hard to really enjoy it. Maybe if I hadn’t seen “The Proposition” I would have liked this western a little more, but that Australian movie, released 2005, just proved to me how much could be done with a western.
One of the things that I realized, and this is a small thing, is that in “The Proposition”, everyone looked dirty and sweaty. Here, everyone is clean. Guys riding all day, jump of the horse, tumble a bit, a few gun shots, and they stand up, and there isn’t a speck of dirt on their clothes, hair perfectly gelled. Now, I usually wouldn’t complain about these things, but I wouldn’t complain because I was used to it. “The Proposition” proved that the standard can be changed. And since that movie could do it, and “3:10” doesn’t, and since it was so fresh on my mind, I could not fully get engrossed in “3:10”.
But I do have also other issues, other than my nit-picking. The movie doesn’t feel like it is set in the wild west. Now I, of course, didn’t grow up in the wild west, so I do not have a frame of reference, but still felt like characters out of a 2007 life. And I don’t mean dirty clothes anymore, I mean the way the characters act and talk. Dan Evan’s (Christian Bale) family seems like your typical 21st century American family. Unsuccessful husband, with a strong wife, who has a rebellious teenager that doesn’t look up to him. The way the 16 year old son talks to him is just so...recent. I kept expecting him to just go, “I HATE YOU!!” and go to his room, slam the door, and put on some loud rock music.
And Ben Wade (Russel Crowe) is your typical modern bad guy character writers make up, when they want the audience to sympathize with them. He is supposed to be the baddest man in the area, yet we never see his viciousness. Sure, he kills a few people, but the writer decides to sugarcoat it for us. In one scene, he kills one of the “good” guys, but the good guy is acting like a dick throughout the movie, so we don’t REALLY hate Wade for doing it. We even have a scene where Dan’s teenage son tells him how Wade isn’t really a bad guy, he really doesn’t believe it, no, Wade isn’t all bad, but Wade replies, “Yes I am.” But here is the thing, he doesn’t seem “rotten as hell” (as he describes it), but it doesn’t make sense if he isn’t, because the movie pretends he is.
All the actors are good, but Christian Bale is brilliant, and he actually seems a bit out of the place in the movie. He is the only character I can see him stepping in “The Proposition” without skipping a beat. He looks tired, scrawny, pathetic, and doing something heroic to prove himself, but the way Bale does it, it does not seem like a big courageous thing to do, but more like suicidal desperation.
The overrated movie of 2007, for an American audience that didn’t have a western in a while, and was recently to love anything that came its way from the wild west.
2/5
