3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma
Studio: Lions Gate
Rated: R
Cast: Russell Crowe, Christian Bale
Director: James Mangold
WorkNameSort: 3:10 to Yuma
Our Rating: 1.50
Critics love to unfairly compare movie remakes to their source material, whether that material be literature or movies made in the recent and not-so-recent past. 3:10 to Yuma probably won’t have to deal with that on most fronts since the original, released in 1957, has barely been seen in the past four decades by anyone but the die-hard Western fans who recognize it for the classic it should have been. One could say that this made it a perfect candidate to be updated; unfortunately, director James Mangold took the definition of ‘remakeâ?� a bit too far. The story of a poor rancher (Christian Bale) who must escort a vicious murderer (Russell Crowe) to a prison train is reminiscent of the original (which, in its own way, liberally cribbed from its source material), Elmore Leonard’s 1953 short story, but the pacing and dialogue goes beyond ‘reminiscentâ?� and into ‘identical.â?� In other words, Mangold tried to make the exact same movie, but with the inexplicable addition of more character development for Bale’s rancher and two extra action sequences in the middle. The result is a preposterous piece of soulless thievery that the understandably ignorant will enjoy.

This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2007.