"I hate posses."

Rating: 8/10 (7 November 2007)

For some, including me, this film represents a dream pairing of two of the greatest living actors of our time in a set up ensuring 117 minutes of deftly delivered dialogue and widespread death and destruction. The result: the most rewarding Western since Clint Eastwood's 1992 Unforgiven. The pace is relentless; no sooner does the film begin than we are introduced to Christian Bale's perpetually stepped on protagonist being attacked by the railroad and Russell Crowe's 'Darth-Vader-there's-still-good-in-you' villain mercilessly holding up a stage coach. Between Crowe's Ben Wade being captured and Bale's Dan Evans eventually delivering him to the eponymous 3:10 to Yuma there are several graphic gunfights, each as memorable as the last, which actually serve to enhance the plot rather than occur solely to keep the attention of the audience. These action set-pieces (of which the finale could rank alongside The Wild Bunch in terms of violence) are interspersed with Evans and Wade's psychologically fought battle against one another, Crowe's character seemingly fascinated with Bale's, needling him and forcing him to take charge throughout. Evans responds in kind by using this as an opportunity to show his son, having long since lost his sense of hero worship towards his invalidated father, that he has the courage to step up to the task at hand when nobody else will. Bale plays this part with an understated excellence, never piling on the dramatics or attempting to emotionally sucker punch the audience, and this is why Yuma works so well. This is also a reason why any film with Christian Bale in has to be worth a look.
In regard to secondary characters, Ben Foster proves once again that he is more than capable of playing the psychotic right hand man without hamming it up (see Hostage) and portrays his character's borderline obsession with Wade admirably. He also receives the best dialogue. Peter Fonda plays Byron McElroy, another term for 'total bad ass.' When he takes a bullet in the stomach he doesn't wimp out like a certain black-suited, skinny-tied undercover policeman crying and bleeding like a wuss, he goes to the doctor, gets the bullet removed WITHOUT MAKING A SOUND and saddles up to lead the posse taking Ben Wade to Yuma. That's what real men are made of. The doctor who accompanies McElroy to make certain he's OK (as if he needs any help) is very formulaic, being reduced to committing a single act of spontaneous violence in order to help the gang and subsequently boasting about it moments before being killed, but not before uttering something like "We made it, didn't we?", a line taken straight from the Clichéd Book of Screen writing, Volume One. Evans' son is played with professional maturity by Logan Lerman, whose character, in the wrong hands, could have ruined every scene he appeared in. Instead he is an asset to the cast, allowing the audience to easily identify with his character.
Criticism to the film mainly appears in the form of a recurring horse noise, recognisable from the PC game Age Of Empires 2. While it may be sad to pick up on this, there is no excuse for using this identical sound of horses whinnying at no less than FOUR different points in the film. How hard is it to record the sound of a couple of horses making noises? It is the horse version of a Wilhelm Scream, lazy and irritating. Additionally, the capture of Wade at the start following his totally unnecessary rendezvous with a bar woman is a little contrived, as if the filmmakers could not imagine any other way Wade could be detained. Finally, the presence of the 'cursed pistol' serves no purpose to the story whatsoever.
Overall, Yuma is a magnificent Western brought to life by star turns from several actors bringing enough depth and emotion to their characters to balance out the fact that "They had a lot of weapons, Mister - and they were shooting bullets."