Christian Bale is an actor that I think one day is going to achieve the status reserved for Brando and Olivier. He's just that good. I don't think I've ever seen him give a bad performance and I've followed his career since “Empire Of The Sun”. I was really interested in seeing how he would handle himself in a Western and I enjoyed his performance a lot. He takes to the Western like a duck takes to water and I certainly hope he does more of them. As for Russell Crowe, this isn't his first Western. He did a great job in Sam Raimi's “The Quick And The Dead' and here he makes his Ben Wade a totally absorbing and interesting character, one that we watch just to see what he'll do next because this is the type of guy who never does or says what you expect.
The supporting cast does a fine job in the roles and I really liked Peter Fonda here, considering that his dad Henry was in what I consider the finest Western ever made: Sergio Leone's “Once Upon A Time In The West”. Peter has a lot of fun playing a tough-as-horsehide bounty hunter here. Fans of the TV show “Firefly” will want to keep an eye out for Alan Tudyk who plays a horse doctor who discovers he's also a man of action.
The action scenes are thrilling and just what I expect from a Western. There's gunplay aplenty, especially during the last half hour of the movie where we have a number of plot twists that are thrown at us in such a way that I defy you not to be sitting on the edge of your seat. And I've said this about a number of recent movies but I'm going to say it again: much as I love CGI there's some movies you don't need it for and The Western is one of them. Sometimes it's a pleasure to go see a movie where it's Real People doing the stunts.
So should you see 3:10 TO YUMA? If you're as big a Western fan as me, Hell, yes. Even if you're not a Western fan and just want to see a movie with great action, solid acting and stunning cinematography, yes. If you're a fan of Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, definitely. They give wonderfully strong, fully characterized performances here. 3:10 TO YUMA is one of those movies you don't want to wait for the DVD. Go see it now.
