L'hommes du train

Rating: 7/10 (16 September 2007)

At least they waited fifty years to remake this which means that most of the popcorn brigade wouldn't have seen the original and have probably never seen an actor half as good as Van Heflin who makes Christian Bale look like the cardboard cutout he is. A lot of critics have been salivating over this remake and hailing it as the Second Coming. Actually it's a fine piece of film-making boasting good visuals and a strong central premise - if we draw a discreet veil over the ridiculous ending - back in the thirties you could just about get away with Jimmy Cagney screaming in terror as he went to the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces so that the punks who idolized him might think twice about emulating him; but Russell Crowe walking onto the train voluntarily just so Christian Bale's son will admire his dead father is just a bad joke - and Good versus Evil is, after all, what the Western has always been about but this one wants to have it both ways so that Crowe's Ben Wade is subtly elevated to a Huey Long figure who does bad in order to do good. If they WERE bent on changing the original - and they WERE because the bulk of that took place in the hotel room allowing Ford and Heflin to spark off each other, whereas in this version the hotel room sequence is probably less than ten per cent of the total footage - then they would have been better to give more screen time to Gretchen Mol as Bale's wife and explore their clearly troubled relationship in more depth. Of course nothing I say here is going to affect the obvious success of this remake so I'll content myself with reserved praise and disappointment for what might have been.