Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

15 June 2008

3:10 to Yuma, dir. James Mangold (2007)

NIKKI says:
I don't really know what I expected with this one. A competent Western -- that's pretty much my pre-viewing summation. I wanted to see the movie, but I wasn't yearning for it in any great way. It was just as I anticipated, too. A good movie, with good performances, some really stand out scenes, but not a movie I would throw up there with my fave Westerns like Tombstone or High Plains Drifter. It just didn't have the emotion of those films, the urgency. I cared for the characters and everything, but they didn't get under my skin like Clint's Stranger or Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday.

I was probably thrown off by how much how movie made me think of Young Guns II. I was finding myself seeing parallels all over the place:

* Alan Ruck's character has his farm taken away by the evil businessmen, and Christian Bale's farm is threatened in this movie. Both characters take it upon themselves to fight for their land, and get mixed up with good and bad guys all looking to make their individual stands against "progress".

* Emilio's Billy the Kid spends a fair amount of time locked up, messing with the minds of his captors, proving himself smart and quick-witted, able to talk himself out of anything. Russell Crowe's Ben Wade gets into a similar circumstance. Both movies have scenes of their anti-heroes talking out a second-storey window while handcuffed.

* Ben Wade rolls into town and watches the townfolk as they go about their business -- washing clothes and kids, hanging out, working hard. The boys do the very same thing in the first Young Guns movie, and the scenes are, again, surprisingly similar in the way they are shot.

* 3.10 featured a 14 year old boy as part of the gang, learning the ropes, while (to a degree) idolising the bad guy. In Young Guns II, Balthazar Getty winds up tagging along with the regulators, and worships Billy, but also finds out, like the boy in 3.10 that there's more to being a man than meets the eye.

... I don't know, just a few things. But as I said to Steve, I felt like I'd seen it all before. Does Young Guns owe something to the original Yuma? Probably. It wouldbe worth taking a look to find out.

Still, I enjoyed the movie.

3.5/5