Peter Rainer on 3:10 to Yuma

I knew Peter years ago in Los Angeles, when he was working as a film critic for the defunct Herald-Examiner and Los Angeles Magazine. I often wondered what happened to him since then. Today I found out, thanks to Google. Glad to see Peter's still working. Here's an excerpt from his review from the Christian Science Monitor:

A posse, of course, is an essential appurtenance of any self respecting Western. It's been a long time – too long – since I've heard those glorious words, "Spread out!" As the posse is methodically worn away and only Dan and Ben remain, "3:10 to Yuma" becomes a study in unlikely kinship – another Western mainstay. Dan knows Ben is a better man than many who have hunted him down. But he never forgets that Ben is a killer.

Bale acts as if he's still playing the POW survivalist from Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn." His hyperrealistic performance is a drag next to Crowe's dapper prince of darkness. Crowe understands that the classic Western villains wear their mythology like a cape. His underplaying here is in many ways as hammy as if he were overplaying, and that's just fine.

Mangold and his screenwriters aren't trying to be revisionists. Ben is celebrated in the dime novels of the day and, in person, he still seems larger than life. Because Dan's son idealizes Ben, or at least the Ben of the dime novels, the movie turns on the notion of heroism. Dan's heroics, in the end, become a match for Ben's antiheroics, and Will learns to love his father.

This drippy father-son stuff is the least successful aspect of the movie, perhaps because it's overly familiar not only from other Westerns, but also from all-too-many current contemporary films. Who can blame Will for being starry-eyed around Ben? From a didactic standpoint, the problem with most morality plays, this one included, is that the villains are almost always more exciting than the champions of decency.

On the other hand, what Alfred Hitchcock once said about thrillers also applies to Westerns: The stronger the bad guy, the better the film. By that measure, "3:10 to Yuma" is excellent. Grade: B+