There’s something reassuring about unapologetic genre
flicks—they’re like comfort food, the cinematic equivalent of
macaroni and cheese, or hot chocolate, or peanut butter and jelly.
Sure, sometimes it’s nice to be caught off guard, but other times, it’s
a-okay to know exactly what to expect.
Director James Mangold’s last film was the Johnny Cash tribute
Walk the Line, a perfectly serviceable entry into the genre of
the cheesy biopic, and one that handily accomplished its twin goals of
(A) tugging on heartstrings, and (B) snagging an Oscar or two. Walk
the Line wasn’t anything extraordinary, but it worked out just
fine, I guess; likewise, Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma doesn’t have any
delusions of grandeur. It just sets out to be a decent enough Western,
and it pretty much succeeds.
Based on Elmore Leonard’s short story (previously adapted in 1957 by
director Delmer Daves and star Glenn Ford), this 3:10 features
an impressive cast (Christian Bale and Russell Crowe), some gorgeous
New Mexico scenery, and a checklist of Western
standards/clichés: mopey and leather-faced men, dusty shootouts,
a bloody holdup.
3:10 to Yuma‘s rote familiarity is Mangold’s fault, not the
actors’—Bale and Crowe both handle their roles with confidence
and charm. Bale, as hard-luck rancher Dan Evans, exudes a weary sort of
determination, while Crowe, as charismatic outlaw Ben Wade, offers up
his considerable appeal and all-around badass-ness. As Bale’s troubled
Evans agrees to help escort the murderin’ Wade to trial, shit hits the
fan: Wade’s men stage a rescue, the treacherous Wade tries to escape,
and Evans is forced to reconsider not only his beliefs, but those of
his wiseass teenage son (Logan Lerman).
And that’s about how it goes, straight up and unsurprising, with two
solid actors doing their thing against unforgiving landscapes and dusty
towns while a stolidly unimaginative director keeps things rolling
along. There are a few moments that raise an eyebrow—in a holdup,
a horse carrying a few sticks of dynamite explodes as if it were a
gasoline tanker in The Matrix, and at one point, there’s a truly
befuddling Luke Wilson cameo. But for the most part, 3:10 to
Yuma is so standard that it feels as if it were made in the ’40s or
’50s, when Westerns were common and generic, before Sergio Leone in the
’60s, before Clint Eastwood’s excellent Unforgiven resurrected
and revitalized the genre in 1992, or even before 2005, when two great
films—John Hillcoat’s The Proposition and Tommy Lee Jones’
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada—reshaped the
genre. The Western has changed, and mostly for the better, in the past
few decades—but you wouldn’t know it to look at the insular
3:10 to Yuma, a film that’s utterly content with worn templates
of noble heroes and scheming rogues. It’s all perfectly enjoyable, and
even a bit comforting—even if, by its end credits, one wishes
they’d seen Crowe and Bale go down a path that didn’t feel quite so
well trod.
