Just OK

Rating: 4/10 (27 September 2007)

Although beautifully filmed, and with capable performances by Christian Bale and Russel Crowe (I agree with the reviewer who compared Bale to Gregory Peck), this movie just doesn't live up to its hype.
I'm willing to overlook a few plot holes and unexpected twists; after all, a story with no surprises is no story, just information. But there's a certain level of credibility beyond which I can't go. You want to have a character survive being shot? Fine, but don't gut-shoot grizzled old Peter Fonda and then have him riding a horse the next day (on what even the characters described as a "hard ride".) Don't have the group reluctantly decide that they must try to sneak through Indian territory, but then build a roaring fire that reveals their position.
I'll even go along with the murderer's being unwilling to kill a protagonist he has come to grudgingly admire, but just because the guards on the prison train were nice enough to let him get off for a minute to say "hi" to his gang, I can't believe he would then GET BACK ON (even if Trigger the Wonder Horse is just waiting for a whistle to come follow.) For that matter, what was there for Crowe to find so admirable in Bale's character? How hard is it to guard a prisoner who will gladly follow you in running and jumping across rooftops, to catch a train that will take him to be hanged? Maybe he just wanted to be there to help out in case Bale's character remembered he has a wooden leg and shouldn't be able to run or jump across rooftops.
By the way, note to Ben Foster, who played the evil-but-loyal sidekick Charlie Prince: tone it down a notch. Every time he came on the screen, I felt like I was watching Mark Rolston's "bull queer" character from "Shawshank Redemption". It's a shame that in a movie where the director was trying so desperately to make everyone "multifaceted" (to the point of unbelievability) that Prince would come off as so unremittingly evil in EVERY scene in which he appeared.
I can't believe that people are comparing this mediocrity to the great old westerns, or to great modern ones ("Unforgiven", for example.) Maybe they're so hungry for the genre that anything with a guy on a horse looks good. After all, this is the finest western to come from a major studio in years. It's just a shame that that doesn't say very much.