Train in vain

Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is a slippery outlaw trying to talk his way out of prison in the western film 3:10 to Yuma. (Lionsgate Films)

The new 3:10 to Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, is a ramped-up remake of the 1950s western classic that attempts to improve on the original; it’s darker and grittier, with more gunplay and quadruple the body count. But for all that, it fails to replicate the one thing that rendered the first film so compelling — the psychological tension between the good guy and the villain, which made for a drama that was more a battle of wits than of Winchesters.

In the 1957 version, Dan Evans (Van Heflin), a poor Arizona rancher with a wife and kids, is loath to get involved in the capture and arrest of notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford), but agrees to do it because he needs the money to see him through a drought. However, as he guards the affable Wade — who, like a silver-tongued Satan, offers him lucrative options if he’ll betray his duty — Evans begins to discover a sense of moral responsibility that goes beyond his personal concerns.

For this ambitious re-imagining, director James Mangold (Walk the Line, Cop Land) and screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas have stuck close to Halsted Welles’s original screenplay — based, in turn, on an early Elmore Leonard story — but they raise the stakes and give the tale a tragic twist. Evans, now played by Bale, isn’t just a simple man who wants to mind his own business, he’s a wounded and haunted Civil War vet whose older son, 14-year-old William (Logan Lerman), regards him disdainfully as a coward. And he isn’t just contending with a lack of rain, but also with a heartless creditor (Lennie Loftin) who burns down his barn when he misses a payment.

This amplification extends to every aspect of the film. Wade (Crowe) and his outlaw gang can’t just rob a stagecoach, they have to torch it, too. (And the coach itself is now equipped with a Gatling gun — perhaps an homage to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and a suggestion of bloodbaths to come.) When Wade is captured and escorted by Evans and a posse to Contention City to catch the prison train to Yuma, the script has them take a pointless detour into hostile Apache territory à la Stagecoach. It’s followed later by a run-in with unsavoury railway workers, which leads to a wholly gratuitous torture scene — maybe to remind future film historians that this picture was made in the era of Abu Ghraib.

Dan Evans (Christian Bale, centre) is an Arizona rancher who tangles with a gang of desperados in 3:10 to Yuma. (Lionsgate Films)

Such excess is what we’ve come to expect with remakes — the moviegoer’s threshold for violence is a lot higher than it was a half-century ago — but in the process of making things uglier and bloodier, the film also muddies the motives of its two main characters. And it doesn’t help that Crowe gives a gimmicky performance as Wade. While Ford’s outlaw was likable and seemingly reasonable — Ford played him like a smooth confidence man in a cowboy hat — Crowe’s bad guy is a slippery, unpredictable figure that no one in his right mind would trust. He may have those dreamy blue eyes and that sly smile — as well as a talent for sketching, to suggest he has a sensitive side — but he also has a gun dubbed “the Hand of God” with a crucifix on its handle, can spout Scripture by heart and is capable of killing a man with a dinner fork. It’s not an uninteresting portrayal, with echoes of Robert Mitchum’s psycho preacher in The Night of the Hunter and Marlon Brando’s mad bounty hunter from The Missouri Breaks, but it’s all surface complexity, so to speak; the character isn’t the con man here, it’s the actor.

Bale might have made a better Wade; he’s usually at his best with ambiguous and deceptive characters, like the two-faced magician in The Prestige or the bland serial killer of American Psycho. He’s sympathetic enough as Evans, who has lost a foot in the war and limps about, keeping a tight rein on his emotions while suggesting an inner torment that is only belatedly explained in the film’s final frames. But, while Heflin’s rancher was a common man you could identify with, Bale’s is sad and almost pathetic, and his stubborn determination to put Wade on the train is no longer about responsibility, but about proving his courage to himself.

Writers Brandt and Haas have also seen fit to add some distasteful retro touches not in the source material, including a gay villain in the form of Charlie Prince, Wade’s right-hand man. He’s played by Ben Foster (the bisexual Russell Corwin on TV’s Six Feet Under) as a prissy-voiced dandy with a sadistic streak, whose reason for rescuing his boss from the law may be more than just gang loyalty. The tightly wound Foster, his pale eyes glaring with wacko intensity, admittedly gives one of the film’s more entertaining performances. Another is provided by Peter Fonda as his macho nemesis, Byron McElroy, a grizzled old cuss of a bounty hunter who refers to Prince mockingly as “Princess.” Fonda, while sounding eerily like his father, Henry Fonda, actually does an amusing variation on another western icon, John Wayne, playing the kind of ornery Rooster Cogburn type who is so tough he treats a bullet in the belly like a minor bout of indigestion.

The film’s strengths are in these flavourful supporting roles; in the way Mangold and his production team evoke a frontier Arizona of ruggedly beautiful wilderness, pocked with a few flimsy, far-apart towns; and in the tightly cut action sequences. That’s enough to make for a decent western, but not a great one. Let’s hope for better from the next horse opera coming down the pike, Andrew Dominik’s intriguing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which premieres Sept. 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Martin Morrow writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.

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