3:10 to Yuma
Directed by James Mangold
It’s some kind of bad joke that a lame genre movie like the new western 3:10 to Yuma gets prestige treatment while War, an ideal example of genre filmmaking, gets ignored. Is it that big-name actors control the market place? Action-movie lout Russell Crowe and art-movie lout Christian Bale play an outlaw and a rancher who exchange thoughts and bullets when the latter escorts the former to a train headed for prison. But this cast is no guarantee of quality. The box-office names are just a sign of director James Mangold’s making yet another stultifying movie star vehicle.
Mangold’s best film, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, showed unusual depth and concentration. He committed to the Cash mythology, giving purpose and excitement to most scenes. Plus, Joaquin Phoenix’s intense lead characterization and Reese Witherspoon’s flip, glossy performance justified Mangold’s penchant for celebrity actors. Even the most contrived historical elements fell into place and built interest; in the final concert scene, Mangold’s dramatic tension would have blown the roofs off movie theaters had there been one more song. So it’s dismaying that 3:10 to Yuma rehashes western motifs—those civilization/wilderness, essence of manhood themes—but builds up to a poorly plotted, shoddily executed gun battle. After ending with numerous bangs, it offers the slump of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that before.”
But we’ve rarely seen a western this unprovocative. Mangold doesn’t engage America’s violent mythology the way he did white Southern Protestant sin-and-redemption in Walk the Line. As shown, every death scene seems perfunctory (and there are plenty, as Crowe and Bale keep running into miscreants and savage Injuns): bodies hurled over ledges or trapped in a burning coach or just shot dead. Mangold favors uninvolving wide shots and banal close-ups—too many of Bale’s gun-loving teenage son. This isn’t violence as the way of the West (as in last Spring’s superior Seraphim Falls) but the way of derivative filmmaking.
Crowe’s bad guy imitates Robert Mitchum’s incorrigibility but without Mitchum’s wit. Anyone interested in new masculine archetypes (and their moral quandary) should seek out Jet Li and Jason Statham in Philip G. Atwell’s War.
Directed by James Mangold
It’s some kind of bad joke that a lame genre movie like the new western 3:10 to Yuma gets prestige treatment while War, an ideal example of genre filmmaking, gets ignored. Is it that big-name actors control the market place? Action-movie lout Russell Crowe and art-movie lout Christian Bale play an outlaw and a rancher who exchange thoughts and bullets when the latter escorts the former to a train headed for prison. But this cast is no guarantee of quality. The box-office names are just a sign of director James Mangold’s making yet another stultifying movie star vehicle.
Mangold’s best film, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, showed unusual depth and concentration. He committed to the Cash mythology, giving purpose and excitement to most scenes. Plus, Joaquin Phoenix’s intense lead characterization and Reese Witherspoon’s flip, glossy performance justified Mangold’s penchant for celebrity actors. Even the most contrived historical elements fell into place and built interest; in the final concert scene, Mangold’s dramatic tension would have blown the roofs off movie theaters had there been one more song. So it’s dismaying that 3:10 to Yuma rehashes western motifs—those civilization/wilderness, essence of manhood themes—but builds up to a poorly plotted, shoddily executed gun battle. After ending with numerous bangs, it offers the slump of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that before.”
But we’ve rarely seen a western this unprovocative. Mangold doesn’t engage America’s violent mythology the way he did white Southern Protestant sin-and-redemption in Walk the Line. As shown, every death scene seems perfunctory (and there are plenty, as Crowe and Bale keep running into miscreants and savage Injuns): bodies hurled over ledges or trapped in a burning coach or just shot dead. Mangold favors uninvolving wide shots and banal close-ups—too many of Bale’s gun-loving teenage son. This isn’t violence as the way of the West (as in last Spring’s superior Seraphim Falls) but the way of derivative filmmaking.
Crowe’s bad guy imitates Robert Mitchum’s incorrigibility but without Mitchum’s wit. Anyone interested in new masculine archetypes (and their moral quandary) should seek out Jet Li and Jason Statham in Philip G. Atwell’s War.
