3:10 to Yuma

Watching Christian Bale stuck in a Hollywood-blocked character that literally could have been played by an actual, sticks-and-straw scarecrow with an attached hidden speaker pouring out some of the grittier dialogue pieces of Little House on the Prairie is not something I'm particularly interested in doing. Sitting through a Russell Crowe image vehicle, desperately waiting--eventually in vain--for a character of his to finally be killed off is similiarly disheartening. Allowing myself to fall victim to a cultural trend of Western-philia, a strange phenomenon that occasionally rears its head at unexpected moments, is downright confusing.

3:10 makes about as much sense plot-wise as the better half of the Bruce Willis catalogue, and falls on the moral spectrum somewhere between Forrest Gump and The Wizard of Oz. The central villain is Ben Foster's Charlie Prince, whose qualities include loyalty, intelligence, resourcefulness, and gratitude. Apparently, his downfall lies in camera angle, the intensity of his stare, and an ominous orchestral phrasing during his scenes. The hero is Bale's Dan Evans, an ineffective and dull Arizona rancher whose moral decisions are based on lawbooks written and enforced by his worst enemies--rich railroad men. Russell Crowe's charmingly ridiculous Ben Wade tap-dances his way across both sides of these moral questions and in the end is rewarded for selling out on the "loyalty among thieves" credo, arguably one of the most important story elements brought to us by the Western.

Treated with a higher degree of intelligence (or perhaps artistic freedom, since we're dealing with a Hollywood blockbuster-wannabee here), this script could have brought down the house in today's world of rich-poor exploitation, pornographic violence in media, and the masculine struggle, but instead the film is nothing more than lifted clichés and poorly-aimed gunshots.