Strong elements, weak links

Rating: 5/10 (3 September 2007)

I love westerns and always want them to do well. This one has many excellent attributes: photography, cohesive story line (mostly), strong performances from most of the cast. But I left disappointed because the two main characters wind up making no sense at the end. Russell Crowe is a bad man who is likable, but would he really go to prison voluntarily out of respect for the "courage" that Christian Bale has shown by refusing to abandon his mission of delivering Crowe to the train? A man who killed one of his captors with a fork and tossed another one, while unconscious, off of a cliff? Would he run through a hail of bullets at the end to help deliver himself into captivity? If he admired Bale so much, why not knock the bumbling idiot out while he had the chain around his throat? Crowe would be free and Bale would have been honored for his valiant effort, even if he was overcome in the end. And Bale....was he on a suicide mission to get out of his depressing life? He was so pathetically eager to prove to his wife and son that he had substance that he was willing to die, leaving them his glorious memory...but nothing else? He's a father in a hard time, it makes no sense for him to engage in a single-handed gun battle with a multitude of thugs. He's got better things to do.
And, what's with the effort to get this vicious thug to prison when it is clear all of the law enforcement people, at least in this movie's script, are amoral cowards ready to be bought? Think how many people would have lived if they had just shot the bastard early on. That would end the movie, so of course that couldn't occur. The focus on bringing him to justice only makes sense in the context of a society that values justice. Evidently, there must be some social sense of law and justice or there would not be a prison at Yuma. But it is sure missing from the townspeople in Contention who all pull their guns and become murderers for hire when Wade's gang offers them money. In a society like that, the typical response would be to shoot Wade post haste instead of dying in a futile effort to "uphold justice".
All the pieces are here for a great Western, but the director's urge to make the genre modern, with an ending in which the bad guy can cheerfully abandon his life of self-centered meanness because he has found a friend in a failed, but stubborn rancher....while the rancher inexplicably finds his greatest moment in dying to uphold a sense of duty that no one else seems to share. Neither character's situation at the end of this story rings true for the times, or for that matter, for the characters as they were at the start of the movie.
And what's with the throwaway cuteness of whistling for the horse? Anyone think he can keep up with train for any distance? Or does that mean Wade intends to get off the train and go back to the bar girl as soon as he out of camera range? Silly joke to end a movie that's supposed to be about duty, honor, justice, etc.