Finally, a western that is almost as good as the classics

Rating: Null/10 (11 September 2007)

I have not seen "3:10 to Yuma" (1957) but I can well imagine how good Glenn Ford and Van Heflin are in their respective roles. The following comments are straightly on "3:10 to Yuma" (2007) and nothing more.
The villain (Ben Wade, played by Russell Crowe) is an arch-villain personified  cool, cold-blooded, stylish and artistic (our first sight of him is at sketching a wild bird perched on a tree). And brains too  a task that a dozen gunmen on horseback can't handle, of stopping a payroll convoy stagecoach equipped with a machine gun, a herd of cattle driven down a slope easily accomplishes. This also sets the tone for the entire movie  it's a movie with brains.
The story of the hero (Dan Evans, played by Christian Bale) is a little more complicated, but is essentially one of a down-trodden hero and a familiar story of the rich trying to take land from the poor. His 14-year-old son William (Logan Lerman) has an important part to play too.
The setup takes about 40 minutes, a tension-fill 40 minutes: through a chain of somewhat random events, the hero finds himself among a group of 5 with the deadly mission of taking the villain to the station for the 3:10 train to Yuma Prison where he is to be hanged. Variations of this plot line have been used in many movies, in various genres, that latest of which I can remember is "Assault on precinct 13" (2005).
The main body of the movie is an odyssey that unfolds in alternating moods of pensive dialogue and chilling action. Except for those who cannot sit still for 5 minutes (and many of these, I suspect, are not pre-teen kids), the movie entertains in many different ways, not the least of which is the psychological duel between the two main protagonists. There is also a large watchable supporting cast, the most remarkable among which are a bounty hunter in the escort group played by Peter Fonda, who needs no introduction, and Wade's second-in-command vowed to rescue his "boss", played by Ben Foster, who steals the show, and not just once.
The 30-minute finale is as good as any you've seen in the action department. But the real challenge in the movie is not one of who draws faster, but something that the 14-year-old throws at the villain, that there is still some good in him, despite the villain's assertion that he wouldn't survive for 5 minutes in the kind of life he lives without being "completely rotten". The vindication comes with the twist at the end.