REVIEW: 3:10 To Yuma

The user reviews for 3:10 To Yuma were impresssive so Mad Professah and the other half went to our favorite local multiplex in Alhambra and caught a weekend screening of the Russell Crowe-Christian Bale remake, rejecting Jodie Foster's revenge fantasy The Brave One and a repeat viewing of Matt Damon's The Bourne Ultimatum in the process. The other film we seriously considered was David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts.


So, surprisingly, we chose the western. We were not disappointed. The most notable feature of the film is not the interplay between Russell Crowe's Ben Wade and Christian Bale's Dan Evans but the mesmerizing performance by Ben Foster as Charlie Prince, the slightly-fey, exceedingly homicidal sidekick to Ben Wade. Although, After Elton objects to an allegedly homophobic subtext that director James Mangold (Walk The Line) has added to his remake which do not appear in the original 1957 version starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Foster's performance is the first performance I have seen this year where one walks out of the theater thinking "That guy should get an Oscar nomination."


When Foster's Prince is on screen, he is absolutely riveting. He exudes a wild-eyed, devil-may-care, sense of someone who has no respect for life whatsoever. His character is shown repeatedly violating various social compacts and particularly the golden rule (do unto others as you would like them to do unto you).

The movie itself is quite suspenseful, with an engaging plot and a suprising twist at the end. Christian Bale's character is part of a posse led by Peter Fonda's character to take Russell Crowe's character to the nearest big city (which is 50 miles away) in order to catch the 3:10 train to Yuma, AZ where there's a federal prison with a hangman's noose for Crowe's Ben Wade, who has been responsible for dozens of robberies and murders. Bale's Dan Evans joins the posse entirely for the money ($200), which he desperately needs to pay off his struggling family farm's mounting debts, which is about to collapse due to a long-running drought.

The movie becomes quite psychological, where the roles of Wade, the greedy, heartless killer and heartless gang leader, and Evans, the gentle, principled farmer and married father of three boys, trade verbal barbs and meaningful glances while they compete for the heart and soul of Evan's oldest boy William. William (played well by Logan Lerman) is unimpressed by the careful ways of his father and is attracted by the danger and dominance exuded by the gangster. By the end of the film, the roles of Crowe's bad guy and Bale's good guy have becomes blurred and it becomes unclear who is leading who to catch the 3:10 train to Yuma.

REVIEW: A-.