Tearing; tense and challenging race-against-time western as feuding sides and ideologies play out under a canopy of high drama.

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2010)

James Mangold's adaptation of the 3:10 to Yuma text is pure pulp in a Western form but with a brain to match: a chase thriller; a morality tale; an interesting clashing of two 'set' American Dream-infused ideologies, as two individual men come together; a power struggle between these two men, further more encompassing the shifting dynamics between other characters as their relations and prior histories with one another are torn and forced together in equality. The film is essentially a telling of getting item 'A' to location 'B', but across the vast and expansive deserts of 19th Century Arizona, as the United States of America was forming. The MacGuffin in this case, the item that kick starts everyone into gear, comes in the living and breathing form of a fearsome bandit – something that doesn't sit there inanimately but is able to have an effect on proceedings. Mangold's film is a masterfully unravelled and tension filled exercise; full of fiercely ambiguous friendships and some deeply rooted rivalries thus perfectly capturing the overall sense of the era as settlers battled against natives; interior clashes between sides played out and the large looming fall out from The Civil War remained.
3:10 to Yuma's relatively simplistic premise paves way and allows for intricate study not to get lost amidst a sea of complicated narrative, that further still would quite probably have given way to exposition. As relations shift and understandings are forced into being forged, the film utilises the arc of its antagonist so as to encompass a revisionist element to proceedings; taking its character from a distinct type before placing him in the company of many men whom mean well, tread a finer line between moral and amoral than the antagonist, as well as the lead himself whom embodies the positive traits associated with both a justified living and justified existence. 3:10 eventually rounds off with a finale that signals ultimate change within the individual. The two main players of the piece are Christian Bale's Daniel Evans and Russell Crowe's Ben Wade, Bale maintaining that odd sense of consistency that sees the effectiveness of his acting diminish without totally evaporating when he himself is not the primal focal point of the film and must be placed up against somebody else in direct opposition.
Evans is a struggling farmer with wife Alice (Mol) and two sons, the eldest of which William (Lerman) is refreshingly more involved in the film than it needed have bothered. Despite ploughing an honest trade, drought has rendered life as a farm unit particularly difficult for the Evans' and a frustrated William observes the hardships through a growingly bitter eye. Indeed the film begins with him slowly, lingeringly turning over a playing card of a bandit in a darkened room with that prominent sense that one's mind is at an age that sees one shift down respective routes that come to outline one's life. Later on, when local council enforcers burn down one of the Evans' barn when repayment didn't come through, he is there again with a rifle ready to shoot them in the back as they ride off. It takes an older, more level head in father Dan to prevent William from taking the first steps into immorality, such is his young and impressionable personality that later on he hears of a location known as Dodge City from the mouth of outlaw Wade and seems dangerously allured.
That person is indeed Ben Wade, an all-in-black clad bandit whose first task it is to observe his minions hold up a stagecoach full of money heading towards a local town from a nearby mountain on high; that sense of power over his followers present in the film positioning him there, far from danger but close enough to see everything that transpires. When it comes to picking apart the wreckage, he wastes no time in taking out survivors and those even in his own clan whom are taken hostage by said survivors. Wade's way of life and character is placed in stark contrast with that of Evans', the film treading a fine line in what it itself thinks of each respective lifestyle in that the life of farming and hardship seems downtrodden and unappealing, with Wade's cut and thrust existence full of action, companionship and reward. But he lives this life with a seemingly respectful eye on his surroundings, toasting to fallen comrades at saloons afterwards and with a strange penchant for sketching the odd item in-between raids. His continuation of indulging in this behaviour later on sees him state proverbs around the Evans' dinner table, at which time the link is made obvious that the character is doing so in the presence of the nourishment brought about by way of moral work instead of the intake of alcohol bought through ill-gotten money.
Opportunities arise for Evans when Wade is caught, and sentenced to death by way of hanging in a penitentiary some miles away. The film's premise seeing several people volunteer to transport Wade to a local train station so as he may be transported to meet his fate. Being the financially struggling farmer he is, Evans is all too keen to aid in this action but hostile natives whom own the land everyone must journey through; others out for Wade's blood on personal vendettas and Wade's own gang are elements to be taken into consideration as they all strive to catch the titular train. The film carries that stark, rapid feel about it in that the journeying to the station is a race-against-time element that sits on a back-burner and simmers effectively as this adventure plays out. While certain aiders in this task fall foul of the elements plus Wade's continuous pleas to be let go for a large fee that'll help Evans no end as rainclouds supposedly form over his farm on the horizon, there is enough tension and ambiguity to drag the film through to its stark and effective finale.