It's a Western? Yay! But what were they thinking?

Rating: 5/10 (20 January 2008)

So I was born in 1950 and raised on Roy Rogers on TV when it was okay for a guy to get shot and get up again, or for hundreds of bullets to miss our hero... There are SPOILERS to come!! But since then I've learned to appreciate how John Ford made Monument Valley a character, how every face shot close-up by Sergio Leone of even the most minor character is a work of art. Tombstone gave us authenticity and a twitchy bad guy who almost approached Jack Palance happily sadistic villain in "Shane". In the original "3:10 to Yuma",(and in "Shane" and even "Airport") Van Heflin was THE everyman, beaten down by fate. "Lonesome Dove" touches your heart and can bring tears to your eyes again and again. I LOVE Westerns, so I had high hopes for a new one.
The new one is adequate, but on the whole, unsatisfactory. It could have been SO MUCH more. It comes close at times but, no, it's not a great Western. I blame mainly the writers, then Mangold, then the cinematographer, and finally the costume designer.
As for the actors, I give them an A for effort. Although Crowe can apparently play this character effortlessly, he does an admirable job. Bale has the much more difficult task, he's too pretty, but he won me over and deserves praise indeed. Ben Foster needed a different shirt and he was menacing enough but that was the character not the acting. Don't tell me you didn't know he would leave the guy to burn alive in the stagecoach.
And THAT brings us to the real problem with this film. Why was the guy still locked up in the stagecoach? There were 20 or 30 other little stupidities like this. I can suspend disbelief only so much and the writers kept foisting so much absolute idiocy and silliness on us that it overwhelms their skill in helping us understand Wade and Evans motives.
The film starts out with a video game battle of a stagecoach chase to capture those with a short attention span who need superviolence and action, meanwhile we're shown that Ben Wade is really an artist, a soul that loves nature, who soon guns down his own henchman for making a mistake. The grizzled well-cast Peter Fonda is gut shot at close range. And they expect me to believe that a few hours later he's riding along like Monty Python's knight..."It was only a scratch!"? Like I said, silliness. More silliness, the good guys have been riding toward Contention while the bad guys are chasing the decoy stagecoach, yet they are close enough to see the stagecoach burning in the distance? They camp in Apache territory at night and light a big fire? William, the older son, was acted well, but his character was a teenager who belonged in the back seat of a "National Lampoon" vacation station wagon, not the 1880's.
While Mangold may succeed in depicting the friendship/hate/admiration relationship between Wade and Evans that's about all I can compliment, and even that was watered down compared to the original. He and his cinematographer jiggled the camera, missed all of the opportunities to show they had learned something about Westerns from Ford and Leone. No use of the landscape, no unique faces in close-ups. Gretchen Mol is a nice Alice but did she look like a careworn wife or more like she had been a week too long between appointments at the hairdresser to get her hair colored properly? And then the ending...an 8-year old could have written a more logical, satisfactory conclusion. Why didn't the marshal and dead-eye Dan just shoot Charlie down in the middle of the street from the hotel window? Why are there women and children out on the streets after the local lawmen had been massacred? How did a 1000 bullets miss Dan and Ben? Why does Wade go part of the way, warning Dan of threats, then suddenly decide he's had enough, and then, when he could have left Dan alive and escaped easily (again!!!!) join him for another jolly jaunt across the rooftops? I am pleased that many people today LIKED a Western, but this is NOT what it should have or could have been. Go ahead and watch it for the story and tension and acting, but if you can't see the holes in this, what are YOU thinking? If this is a movie you liked, then PLEASE go watch "For a Few Dollars More", and "Shane" and "The Searchers" or the complete first "Lonesome Dove", even "Tombstone"!!!!! Finally watch the original "3:10" for a much better ending. Then perhaps you will see why I say this could have been so much more, but, sadly, it just is not what it SHOULD have been.