Because 3:10 to Yuma is such an amiably middlebrow venture, I’m going to give it a star rating. Because movies like 3:10 to Yuma deserve star ratings, the type that you can find in any local daily newspaper, possibly in their Weekender section, which effectively say nothing about the film as an aesthetic venture but present a plot summary and a summation of the three aesthetic qualifications most reviewers go on when deciding on whether or not a movie is good:

1) Seriousness of intent

2) Quality of acting

3) Entertainment value

I say quality of acting because that’s the one thing that pretty much all critics, like viewers, are able to discern. I don’t, however, mean ‘quality’ to describe where it falls on the good-bad scale. Often films with very good acting would be described by most viewers as having bad acting because the style of performance presented falls outside contemporary trends in naturalistic acting style (cf. Yuma’s Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn - what a performance!)
But I digress.

3:10 to Yuma is pretty solid genre fare! Having not seen the original (shock! but then, we watch Anthony Mann movies and not Delmer Daves movies because Francois Truffaut told us to, so blame him), the film seems a particularly odd one to adapt - are we to find some connection between this film and our modern era? Certainly, if the film is supposed to serve as some commentary for the modern era, I’ve lost it. There are absolutely classic westerns which would seem better suited for the purposes: Mann’s The Far Country, with crooked businesspeople-politicians trying to bilk a resource-rich village out of its untapped bounty, or Decision at Sundown, Budd Boetticher’s oddly allegorical (and, admittedly, oddly bad) story of a man’s slow realization that the man he’s set out to kill is the wrong guy, and that he might want to see how his own actions led to his wife’s death. But here the political commentary is at best murky - there’s nothing particularly allegorical about its passionate contemplation of masculinity and its harrowing blend of Peckinpah, Leone, and 50s Technoscope pageants.
No, that can’t be it. No real political commentary to be found here, besides some atypically knowledgeable (if perhaps unfortunately wallpapery) treatment of the use of Chinese immigrants to build the railroads. Instead, what we have here is a case of filmmakers seizing upon a good story and deciding it’s good enough to be told twice. Which probably isn’t a very serious intent, but it’s good enough for me. That sort of treatment uniquely suits this narrative, which feels epic and yet small scale. The basic temporal query - will they make it in time? - is the stuff of everyday contemplation.

The action sequences are well-choreographed, though the final sequence, in which a hobble-legged Bale performs some striking acrobatic feats - begs a thorough brow-furrowing.

James Mangold’s direction is competent.

Oh, and the acting is great.

*** (Three Stars).

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