‘3:10 to Yuma’ an inauspicious return of the Western genre

As a matter of full disclosure I feel it necessary to tell you that, as a filmgoer, I have an extraordinary bias for Westerns. I have yet to experience a feeling comparable to that little twinge of excitement I get when seeing someone take familiar aspects from a well-worn genre of larger-than-life posturing and come up with something original and exciting. Westerns, to me, are the genre that best represents that possibility.

That little twinge came rushing in several times during my viewing of James Mangold’s remake of “3:10 to Yuma,” whenever the gunslingers talked tough and grazed their thumbs across the hammers of their Schofields and their Winchesters; but once the film exhausted its running time and that titular train chugged past the station and exited, frame right, I was left with a distinctly empty feeling. After all of that sound and fury, what are we left with, exactly? The film leaves a lot of unfinished ideas littered across its landscape and never really comes together into a cohesive whole. It seems that, for 15 years now, with every passing entry into this genre, we are forced to contemplate if Sergio Leone really was the only director who could turn the purest, most undiluted Western concepts into brilliant deconstructions, whether “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood’s heartbreaking elegy and apologia for the cinematic interpretation of the Old West, really was the last word that anyone could offer.

“3:10 to Yuma” does carry with it a few interesting notions in its story of Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a disenfranchised Civil War vet turned poor rancher who has elected to help escort dangerous outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the town of Contention, where that train will arrive and send him to Yuma Prison to await the gallows. Paramount among these notions is that it doesn’t take more than a cursory look at Ben’s companions to recognize the clashing interests at hand: along for the ride is the owner of the railroad that threatens to plow through Evans’ land (Dallas Roberts); one of the thugs hired to scare Evans away (Johnny Whitworth); a grizzled old Pinkerton man, the victim of Wade’s latest stagecoach heist (Peter Fonda); and an exceedingly moral veterinarian (Alan Tudyk).

Furthermore, as Wade slowly attains the upper hand through his own psychologically manipulative ways—and the help of his rapidly approaching gang, led by the brutal Charlie Prince (Ben Foster)—and the posse quickly dwindles in numbers, the question arises if this pliable concept called “justice” is really worth the long trail of dead bodies that the journey has supplied. (The most poignant revelation to this end arrives when Wade admits that he has twice broken out of Yuma.) But once Evans’ son (Logan Lerman) joins the posse, Evans is forced to re-establish his manhood (weakened thanks to his lowly position in life and a leg lost in the war) and set a good example by walking into what almost certainly amounts to a painful death. It’s all interesting stuff, no doubt. The problem with all of that, however, is the fact that these are not new concepts in the Western genre; everything it has to say about the nature of manhood and justice has surely been expounded on more eloquently in movies that have been available to the public for decades. Even when considering the fact that this is a remake of a 50-year-old film, the truth of the matter is that Mangold has nothing new to bring to the table beyond the aforementioned “cursory look” and a bloated expectation for critical hosannas as he presents the same old stale arguments. With horror being another genre often cited as carrying a certain “cinematic purity,” it isn’t a stretch to hold “3:10 to Yuma” up against Rob Zombie’s flawed but fascinating remake of “Halloween,” a film that examines the nature of the visceral fears that were so brilliantly exploited in John Carpenter’s original. None of that really results in anything particularly shocking, but its fresh take on such classic, venerated material resulted in some genuine intellectual stimulation. “3:10 to Yuma” has no such aspirations, and is content to leave you with everything that you’ve seen and heard a hundred times over.

It must be said that this lethargy eventually infects its gunfight scenes as well, cribbing a lot of aesthetic choices from superior films (“High Noon” immediately springs to mind during its final shoot-out—along with maybe a few first-person-shooter video games)—and eventually leaves behind all of the excitement that it manages to create on its own with its taut performances and sometimes gritty dialogue. The film’s box office success may be a sign that audience interest in the Western can be reinvigorated; whether or not that can also mean an artistic reinvigoration is another question entirely. No matter, let’s just wait a week for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and see if that can whet our cinematic appetites.