Yuma derailed

Rating: 2/10 (1 October 2011)

Never before has the wild west been so gunslinging, deadly and immoral. A small-time one-legged rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is struggling with debt and is on the verge of his land being taken away by the railroad. Desperate to not let his family down decides to take on the task of transporting the notorious Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the 3:10 train to the Yuma prison facility. However his gang of cutthroats and reckless murderers have different plans...
The attempted remake of the 1957 film garnered at reviving the Western genre made quite a splash at the box office in no small part thanks to terrific performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Actually the whole cast does a commendable job with selling a script somewhat short of imbecilic. Another character worth mention is Ben Foster playing the dastardly second-in-command Charlie Prince. However even their best attempts can't hide how poorly written this movie is.
What is even more shocking is that the scriptwriters had a perfectly good script to base this movie on. The 1957 version - with all its flaws and low budget - had a tight, compelling and intriguing script which only needed to be brushed up and slightly expanded on. To some extent that was what was done, but somehow Welles and Brandt manage to add a cascade of ideas which derail the Yuma train from any semblance of logic.
Warning signs appear from the word go. Given the movie was sold as being realistic or gritty the Gaitling-machine gun opening sequence, as if taken from the annals of "Wild Wild West", sends out all the wrong signals. Such over-the-top action made me feel like in the middle of a Michael Bay movie set in New Mexico in the XIXth Century. And that is never a good sign. In an apparent attempt to feed considerably more high-budget action than the laid-back original the movie is unable to replicate it's unrelenting feeling of suspense.
I must add that I'm not exactly an aficionado of the old Westerns, so I really expected that given the star potential plus the vastly superior movie standards, this new version would sell the idea the way the original couldn't. The final pay-off is however sacrificed for sheriffs riding horses a day after being shot in the belly, blood-hungry Apache Indians and various non-sensical sequences (full with some horrendous wink-winks to its predecessor) which riddle the road to the train station in Contention. In the end the only scenes that really manage to work in this movie are those which are copy-pasted from the 1957 original version (which wasn't really that good).
The coup d'etat comes with the final resolution. WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS. Brutally gutting the movie with ridiculous action the movie already has it rough to sell a believable ending. Unfortunately the slight gentlemanship of Glen Ford is substituted for a blood-hungry crazed and otherworldly fast-gunning Russell Crowe. The earlier movie had one gruesome murder throughout, while this revamped version has blood and guts spilling in the dozens. This makes the final resolution hard to swallow, especially given the change of heart occurs thanks to a pathetic sob story told by Dan during strangulation. From then on Crowe's character gingerly runs in leaps and bounds aboard a train set for Yuma straight towards his planned hanging. Just so the public don't feel too gutted by this turn of events Ben Wade lackadaisically mentions he's broken out of Yuma twice before.
What really killed this movie for me was the pay-off, which worked in the original so well. In 1957 Glen Ford's rather silent and enigmatic character decides to help Dan Evans fulfil his mission, due to admiration he starts having towards the unrelenting honest rancher. It is done in such a way, which makes the story spin conceivable, as the help supplied by Ben Wade is lasts just several seconds and can be sold as a spur of the moment initiative. The death of Charlie Prince functions here as unfortunate collateral of this turn of events. In the 2007 blockbuster Russell Crowe actively leads the way to the Yuma train for several arduous minutes. Given he is supposedly the leader of this gang of misfits wouldn't it be easier for him to just tell them to just stop with all this shooting, chasing and killing? On arriving on board the Yuma train Dan Evans is killed by the unknowing Charlie Prince. This ends with Ben Wade singlehandedly gunning down his whole posse of gunslingers. Need I remind you that the only reason those poor dimwits were there in the first place is to save their leader from prison? Absolutely appalling plot resolution.
Given such stupidity not even the best intentions of the cast, make-up department or cinematography can change this movie from being a veritable train-wreck that never made it to Yuma.