Film

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Director: James Mangold

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Delmer Daves’s pulpy 1957 cowboy tale was a solid second-tier potboiler, memorable for Glenn Ford psychologically breaking down Van Heflin’s hired escort while they wait for a prison-bound train. James Mangold’s update hews closely to the original—which, ironically, is the most daring thing about this remake. Other than a brief nod to contemporary sociopolitics via a “torture is wrong!” sequence, there’s no sign of the revisionist tendencies that have been a prerequisite for post-’70s horse operas. Now that Westerns fall somewhere on the scarcity scale between honest democratic elections and comet sightings, having the chutzpah to make a straightforward, unself-aware oater feels downright revolutionary.

Whether that’s enough to justify this enterprise, however, is debatable. Mangold certainly knows how to milk macho conflict, turning exchanges between Christian Bale’s law-abiding family man and Russell Crowe’s Proverbs-quoting outlaw into giddy scowlathons, while leaving Ben Foster’s baroque badass sidekick to handle the homoerotic undertones. And the inventive, white-knuckle manner in which the director presents a stagecoach robbery—Peter Fonda blows up a horse!—proves he’s no slouch in choreographing action set pieces, even if he relies too heavily on computer-generated effects later on. (Apparently, just because a movie takes place in the 1800s doesn’t mean the characters can’t run from a CGI fireball.) But though situational complexities are introduced, there’s little here that the original didn’t cover just as well. Which prompts the obvious question: If you’re not adding anything to the mix besides harsher violence, why remake this semipopular title at all?