3:10 to Yuma (2007) Review
8/10
A rancher whose barn has been burned by a creditor watches a stagecoach robbery, is robbed himself of his horses, and volunteers to help escort the captured outlaw to a train in exchange for two hundred dollars.
The 8 is for a remake that has a genuine reason to exist. It keeps the negotiation and adds a road, which means the two men have days together instead of hours and the relationship can develop instead of simply hold.
What it loses is the earlier film’s discipline. There is a great deal more shooting, a tunnel sequence that belongs in a different picture, and an ending that reaches for something the story has not quite earned.
The Son Changes Everything
The most significant addition is William, fourteen, who follows them, catches up, and refuses to go home.
That single change converts the film’s subject. The 1957 version is about a man proving something to himself. This one is about a man proving something in front of his son, who has openly stopped respecting him.
Logan Lerman plays the boy as somebody genuinely impressed by the outlaw, which is the necessary and uncomfortable part. Wade is charming, competent and interesting, and William’s father is none of those things in the ways a fourteen-year-old measures.
The scene where Dan tells his son what happened to his leg is the film’s best writing. He was shot in the foot, running away, by his own side, and he has let the boy believe something else for years.
It is delivered flatly, at night, to a boy who has been told a different story his whole life, and Bale plays it without any appeal for sympathy. The confession is not an attempt to be forgiven, it is a man correcting a record before he runs out of time to do it.
Adding a witness changes what a story is about without changing what happens in it. The same events performed in front of somebody whose opinion matters become a different book. Choose the witness carefully. A child who has stopped respecting the protagonist is the most demanding audience available.
Give the protagonist a lie he has been living inside. The revelation about the foot costs him the last thing he had, which is what makes the rest of the journey necessary instead of optional.
Let the antagonist be genuinely more impressive. If the boy’s admiration is not credible, the tension evaporates.
Ben Foster
Charlie Prince is Wade’s second, dressed better than anybody in the film, devoted past any reasonable limit, and entirely without a conscience.
Foster plays him as somebody in love, which is the reading the script permits and does not state. Every decision Charlie makes is about getting Wade back, and he burns through people to do it without ever raising his voice much.
The performance is specific in a way the rest of the film is not. A particular walk, a particular way of holding a weapon, an accent that sounds learned instead of native, and a stillness that arrives right before he kills somebody.
His last scene is the film’s most shocking and it is entirely in character. What Wade does to him is the only moment in either version where the outlaw acts from something other than amusement.
Before that, the Tucson sequence is his best material. Charlie walks into a town, works out in about a minute which building holds the man he wants, and destroys everything in his way while talking to people politely. Foster plays the politeness as the frightening part.
Crowe and Bale
Russell Crowe plays Wade with more weight and less charm than Glenn Ford did, which is the correct adjustment for a longer film. Ford had to be likeable for an hour in a room. Crowe has three days and can afford to be genuinely unpleasant in stretches, then interesting, then unpleasant again.
He also gets the sketchbook, which is a good invention. Wade draws, well, and the drawings are how the film shows him paying attention to people he may kill later.
Christian Bale’s Dan is more damaged than Van Heflin’s and the film gives him more to be damaged about. A leg lost to friendly fire while running, a failing ranch, a wife who is patient in a way that is visibly costing her, and a son who has seen all of it.
The two of them are best in the small exchanges instead of the confrontations. A conversation about what a man’s word is worth, conducted while walking, is better than anything either of them says under pressure.
Peter Fonda is the other good addition, as a Pinkerton man who has been doing this for thirty years and enjoys the cruelty of it. He is on the side of the law and is worse company than the outlaw, which the film establishes and then refuses to underline.
When you extend a story, use the extra room for the relationship instead of the plot. Three days of travel lets two characters change their opinion of each other, which an hour in a room cannot. The failure mode is filling the additional time with incident, and this film partly does that.
Give an antagonist a skill unrelated to violence. The sketchbook makes Wade a person who observes, which retroactively explains why he is good at what he does.
Adjust the performance to the runtime. Charm that sustains an hour becomes tiresome across two, and Crowe correctly plays something heavier.
Where It Overreaches
The tunnel sequence, the Apache attack and the Chinese labor camp are all well staged and none of them belong. Each adds incident to a story whose strength is pressure.
The 1957 film had four men in a room and a clock. This one keeps adding obstacles, and every obstacle is a break in the thing that makes the story work, which is two people being stuck with each other.
The body count is also a problem. Wade kills a great many people across the film and the earlier version kept him mostly seated, which made him more frightening instead of less. A man who has to demonstrate what he is capable of has stopped being a threat the audience imagines and started being a spectacle that the audience simply sits there in the dark and watches him go ahead and perform the whole of it for them at what feels like considerable length.
None of this sinks it. The additions are competent and the core survives them, and a viewer coming to this first will not notice what has been diluted.
Mangold is also a considerably better director of action than the material requires, and the hotel sequence at the end, moving through rooms and across roofs with the geography kept clear, is the best staged shootout on this page after The Wild Bunch.
The Ending Goes Too Far
They reach the train. Dan gets Wade aboard. Charlie Prince shoots Dan in front of his son, and then Wade kills Charlie and every member of his own gang, and boards the train voluntarily.
The first half of that is earned and devastating. Dan dies having done the thing, in front of the boy, and the exchange between father and son before it is the payoff the whole film was built toward.
What follows is too much. Wade executing his entire gang converts him from a man who makes decisions for his own amusement into a man delivering a verdict, and the film has not established that he cares that much.
The whistle at the end is the correct final beat and almost redeems it. He whistles for his horse, which has followed him the whole film, and the audience understands that Yuma will not hold him, exactly as the 1957 version stated outright.
What the boy takes from it is the thing the film is finally about. He watched his father die doing something pointless in practical terms, and the pointlessness is not the lesson. The lesson is that his father did it, and the film ends before anybody can explain that to him.
An ending can be too generous. Killing his own men gives the audience a catharsis the story had not built toward, and it costs the character his defining unpredictability. The test is whether the final action requires a motive the reader has seen. If you have to supply it in the last two minutes, it is unearned.
Kill the protagonist in front of the person he was performing for. Everything about the death works because the boy is standing there.
End on the smallest available gesture. A man whistling for a horse says everything the film needs about what happens next.
Should you watch 3:10 to Yuma (2007)?
Yes, and watch the 1957 version first. This one has more film in it, a genuinely good reason to exist in the son, and the best supporting performance in a Western in thirty years, wrapped around an ending that is one killing too generous.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists