Clichéd and Unrealistic Throughout

Rating: 5/10 (17 September 2007)

I went to this movie expecting to see a modern western with at least some shreds of realism and creativity, such as I had seen in Eastwood's movie, The Unforgiven and the TV series Lonesome Dove. Unfortunately, that was not the case. 3:10 showed us just about every cliché and unrealistic action scene that abound in old grade B westerns. My suspension of disbelief was zero, I didn't believe a word of this movie. Here are a few examples why:
Gatling gun in stagecoach. An armored stagecoach with a Gatling gun mounted so it's field of fire through a slot traversed about 45 degrees....from any other angle it was blind and useless. So where did the attackers collect? Why in a bunch in front of the gun, of course.
We never shoot horses. What would killers like these guys do to stop and rob a flying stagecoach pulled by a team of six? Don't you think the first thing they would do would be to shoot one of the horses so that dragging the dead horse would screw up the whole team and harness...and if that didn't wreck the flying stagecoach, shoot another one...and if that didn't...you get the idea. But no, these outlaws were too humane to do that, they let the stagecoach keep going...and going...and going...while the Gatling gun and marksmen inside the bouncing stagecoach picked some of them off. I'm a pretty good shot, but I sure wish I could hit a man galloping on horseback under those conditions. Wait a mo...maybe it would be easier to just shoot the horse out from under him...no, can't do that...it wouldn't't be humane, even it might save my life.
The marshal who was gut-shot in an early scene, (and provided us with two nice clichés, the doc was a veterinarian, ha ha, and the tense scene of the forceps picking the slug out of his belly without anesthetic and being dropped...tink...into a pan) was up and ready the next day for a hard ride through the pass to take the prisoner to Bisbee. Some constitution I must say.
When the outlaw who was famous for his ruthless killings and bloody escapes, was brought to the ranch house (plot cliché contrived to make that necessary) the rancher let him eat at his family's dinner table with his wife and impressionable son. Yeah, right.
The movie begins with the cliché of the barn burning and the rancher trying to save his horses. This burning was utterly unexplained and unmotivated.
During the dangerous ride through the pass and Indian country, the outlaw gets the jump on the marshal and rancher and ruthlessly kills the marshal. Later, the rancher and his son turn the tables and the rancher gets the gun back. Now, don't you think that as soon as the rancher got his hands on the gun he would have instantly shot the outlaw and taken the quickest way to get himself and his son to safety? But no, he has to risk his son's life and his own to get this guy past the Indians, and past the outlaw's gang who were coming to rescue him, so he could catch a train and go to prison. Spare me.
In the big final scene wherein the rancher brings the outlaw to catch the train, the rancher pulls the outlaw along with him while they run through alleys and over rooftops amidst a storm of gunfire from the outlaw's henchmen...and the outlaw simply runs along with the rancher and even climbs on the roof with him, making no attempt to grab the rancher's gun, or duck away from him or jump off of a building to get to his men...does nothing at all to save himself from life in prison. Totally unbelievable.
And lastly, if you were the outlaw's top henchman, experienced in robbing trains and killing the occupants as related earlier, and your boss was to be taken by train to Yuma and prison, and you had lead the gang into Bisbee to save him...wouldn't't it occur to you to disable the train as soon as it arrived, so no matter what the rancher did he couldn't win, he would just be stuck there in Bisbee, outnumbered twenty to one, till he gave up?
I love good westerns, have lived in the west all my life, know Bisbee and Yuma, Durango, Lordsburg, Tombstone and Las Cruces and all of the places where famous actual outlaws lived...but I just couldn't swallow this movie. Sorry.