Just saw 3:10 to Yuma and felt like typing a short burst of enthusiasm. It's an excellent movie, thrilling and absorbing and exceptionally well-written and well-acted for a Hollywood movie circa 2007. I do admit to a fondness for the Western genre (John Ford's epics, Howard Hawks' perfectly-cut gems, Sam Peckinpah's bloodbaths and romances, Sergio Leone's gothic spaghettis, Tombstone, Deadwood, and on the literary front Cormac McCarthy's bloody awesome and bloody bloody Blood Meridian) but I'm also fairly alert to its potential for cliche, bombast, and sentimentality. This film doesn't strike a single false note; the action is the opposite of pornographic and the characterization and the screenplay are rooted in the great Western tradition but mercifully free of cliche.
Russell Crowe's diabolically charming rogue is well, diabolically charming. Just great fun to watch, that man. He continues to be one of the most entrancing screen presences alive: rugged and masculine (I'm swooning) as well as poetic and soulful. In short, he can make a perfect sketch of a bird or a naked woman, quote Shakespeare and the King James Bible, draw his pistol faster than any other sonufabitch from here to Dodge City, and chuck a man over the edge of a cliff for not reading more books.
I feel guilt getting so swept up in the Russell Crowe charm-maelstrom, because Christian Bale is just as excellent. Intense, brooding, dark, but with a disarming integrity and earnestness; he seems to specialize in those types of characters. The supporting cast is made up of several impressive character actors, all of them inhabiting their roles with exuberant relish. Luke Wilson makes a brief but memorable appearance at a railroad blasting sight, and Ben Foster (whose acting as a recurring character on Six Feet Under I'd always admired) is genuinely frightening as an uber-sadistic murderer in a Confederate jacket.
The script, based on a story by Elmore Leonard (the greatest crime novelist of our time, and one of the finest Western-writers, loved and celebrated by Saul Bellow and Martin Amis), is full of laconic, deadpan one-liners nearly as good as the ones in Tombstone. The story is damn compelling, the cinematography captures the brisk air of the Arizona deserts in winter in a way that makes me want to go out West, and there are Apaches, Chinese railroad workers, gunslingers, crooked marshals, shady Southern Pacific businessmen, and Russell Crowe as a notorious outlaw!!!
In short, see it.
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