3:10 to Yuma Review

Maybe it was the lack of air conditioning in the theater, or the fact that the shaky camera work caused me to feel motion sickness for a solid two hours, but I think the 3:10 to Yuma is one train I won’t be catching again. Have you ever watched a movie and thought “there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but for some reason I just don’t like it?” I mean technically speaking it was fine. The acting was good enough. The story chugged along and hit all the usual stops along the way. The script was coherent. If I were asked to pinpoint just one thing that really made me dislike this movie I don’t know if I could. I just didn’t enjoy myself, and hey, maybe that’s reason enough.

I don’t watch movies expecting to see something I’ve never seen before. In fact, I hate when twists are shoved in for the sake of it, but this movie just felt so by the numbers that I could see every scene coming from a mile away. You have the morality play between the hardened criminal and the put upon everyman who just wants to provide for his family. Then there’s the father struggling to make ends meet, which is taking a toll on his marriage and family. Then said father has a mouthy kid who thinks he knows it all but will eventually learn a lesson. There’s the group of characters who shouldn’t even have names because they are just there to get slowly killed off. And then you have the aging genre star who makes a return to the type of films that helped make his career as a wink to the audience aka Peter Fonda.

Fonda is almost as much of a caricature in this film as he was in Ghost Rider, another movie where he applied the same shtick. While we’re on the actors, can we just discuss how annoyingly obnoxious Russell Crowe has become? He is 3:10’s bad guy, Ben Wade, but he is the exact character Crowe has been playing for YEARS: the gruff warrior with the heart of a poet. It’s another clear attempt to feed the story he has created for himself about himself. Every time he was onscreen I just wanted to punch him in the face. His character is the villain, but he can’t just be an Old West villain, he has to be a gunslinger who quotes the Bible and sketches people. I hate it when characters are given quirks in order to “deepen the character development.” It’s everything that’s wrong with movies anymore. Characters can’t just be who they are, they have to have phony versions of DEPTH. As if he wasn’t annoying enough, he is given a horrible sidekick played by Ben Foster, the guy who played Angel in X-men 3. Remember what I said about wanting to punch Russell Crowe? Well replace the words “punch in the face” with “hit with a two by four.” Christian Bale is fine and turns in a solid performance and Gretchen Mol reminds us she is still alive and has found herself work.

So let’s talk about the story. Bale’s character volunteers to help transport Crowe’s character to the train referenced in the title so that he can earn the money needed to free his family from some type of Old West loan shark. And that’s mostly all that happens. The first ten minutes aside, I waited a painfully slow hour and a half hoping for the action to kick in, and most of it was spent fighting off the nausea caused by the constant shaky cam. If I wanted to watch the movie on the back of a horse I would’ve done so. I don’t need to feel like I am there. I don’t watch movies to see reality.
At any rate, 3:10 to Yuma is a decent movie that I hated. I say that because I have a feeling I will be in the minority of negative opinions on this one and I can’t really say it was awful, it just wasn’t for me. If you love Westerns, or Russell Crowe, you’ll probably like it, but as for me, one ride was enough.