3:10 to Yuma (2007) Review
8/10
A rancher whose barn a creditor has burned 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’s a real reason to exist. It keeps the negotiation and adds a road. That means the two men have days together instead of hours and the relationship can develop instead of simply hold. Bale and Foster are why this remake works for me. It’s a Western that takes its characters seriously and still remembers to be exciting, and I enjoy it a great deal. My complaint is that Mangold doesn’t trust the core story enough to leave it alone, and that’s what holds it at an 8. What it loses is the earlier film’s discipline. There’s a great deal more shooting, a tunnel sequence that belongs in a different picture, and an ending that reaches for something the story hasn’t 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 impressed by the outlaw. That’s 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’s let the boy believe something else for years.
It’s 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. He’s a man correcting the record before he runs out of time, with no bid for forgiveness in it. That scene is the reason I rate the film as high as I do.
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’s been living inside. The revelation about the foot costs him the last thing he had. That’s what makes the rest of the journey necessary instead of optional.
Let the antagonist be more impressive. If the boy’s admiration isn’t 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. The script permits that reading and never states it. Every decision Charlie makes is about getting Wade back, and he burns through people to do it without raising his voice much. I think it’s the best thing in the film, and I’d take a whole movie about Charlie.
The performance is detailed in a way the rest of the film isn’t. 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’s 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. That’s 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 unpleasant in stretches, then interesting, then unpleasant again.
He also gets the sketchbook. That’s 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’s patient in a way that’s 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’s on the side of the law and is worse company than the outlaw. The film establishes it and refuses to underline it.
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 can’t. 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. That retroactively explains why he’s 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. That’s two people being stuck with each other.
The film starts to lose me with the body count. Wade kills a great many people across the film, where the earlier version kept him mostly seated, and the seated Wade was more frightening. A man who has to show what he’s capable of stops being a threat the audience imagines and becomes a spectacle it watches. None of this sinks it. The additions are competent and the core survives them, and a viewer coming to this first won’t 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 builds toward.
What follows is too much, and it’s the part of the film I’d argue with hardest. Wade executing his entire gang turns him from a man who acts for his own amusement into a man delivering a verdict, and the film hasn’t shown me he cares that much. I’d have cut straight from Dan’s death to Wade stepping onto the train.
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 won’t 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 isn’t 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 hadn’t 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’s 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 real reason to exist in the son and the best supporting performance in a Western in thirty years. It gets an 8 because Mangold keeps piling tunnels, Apaches and extra gunfights around a story that needed two men and a clock, and then ends it one killing too generous. Bale and Foster make it worth every one of those points.
