3:10 to Yuma

SPOILERS HERE. This is a considerably pumped-up remake of a 1957 movie based on an Elmore Leonard short story. Outlaw and murderer Ben Wade has been captured because he did a really dumb thing. Now he has to be put on a train to the prison in Yuma, but his gang will try to get to him first. In the original there was only a small-time rancher, played by Van Heflin, and the town drunk involved in transporting and protecting the prisoner. Here, we get half a dozen, who gradually get whittled down until there’s only the rancher, Christian Bale. Everything has to be much bigger these days. Also, his son tags along, which is a new element. The son admires Wade, who is smart, charming and glamorous. He’s in dime novels. Dad is a plodder. So the movie becomes one of a father redeeming himself in the eyes of his son. The shoot-out at the end is much bigger, too.

I was enjoying it right up to the last ten minutes. Well, I had a bit of a problem with the stagecoach driver, Peter Fonda, taking a .45 caliber bullet in the gut at point blank range, early on, and then basically shrugging it off. Uh-uh. You get gut-shot, and have the bullet pulled out by a veterinarian with dirty tongs, you do not shrug it off and go about your business. Soon you are one sick puppy, oozing pus from your belly, and soon after that you are dead. They hardly bothered to treat such wounds in the Civil War. But okay, westerns are larger than life, there is a lot of symbolism. And it seemed that Ben Wade was being awfully accommodating. Yeah, he attempted to escape, but once they holed up in the hotel he could have gotten away and saved everybody a lot of trouble. Then we get to the big climax, and it lost me completely. I just couldn’t believe that Wade would gun down his own gang, and then board the train voluntarily. He did board the train in the original, and both the rancher and Wade’s gang survived. Here, everybody dies except Wade and the son. He was repaying the rancher for saving his life. Now, that’s a little hard to swallow, since I really don’t believe in honor among outlaws except to their own gang, but killing his own men was way over the top.

I wanted to like it more, and I did, almost all the way to the end. It had a nice, gritty feel. The sets and so forth looked real good, they captured the era well. You might say the set designer had a … dramatic pause … a good sense of Yuma. (God, I’ve wanted to use that line for years now, and there it is!) (And okay, we don’t ever really see Yuma, we see Bisbee and Contention, but it was too good to pass up.)