Movie review: A classic western rides again in 'Yuma'

There are gunfights, stagecoach crashes and dynamite blasts in "3:10 to Yuma," yet the real conflict of the piece is emotional. This is a western where closeups are more important than panoramic vistas. Between the battle scenes, the film becomes a tense battle of wills between badman Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) and Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a cash-strapped farmer who joins the posse escorting him to the prison train.

"Yuma" (***½ out of four stars) sees the western through a lens clouded by doubts and complexities. It's closer to the ambiguities of film noir, with the horse opera's classic stock characters here shown as more, or less, than we expect. Wade is a courtly, brilliant thug who sketches birds while waiting for the payroll coach to arrive. He's a fearless killer who sometimes takes pity on lesser mortals, sometimes wryly quotes the Bible before puttin' daylight in a man's guts. He is, in his renegade way, a brave, decisive character.

Evans is decent but unlucky, wagering his family's future on a farm in parched Arizona, and about to be evicted. When thugs torch his barn, he stares with the pained gaze of a man who has the whole world arrayed against him. His 14-year-old eldest son, William (Logan Lerman), a dime-novel enthusiast, sees robbers as Robin Hoods and his father, diminished by wounds he suffered in the Civil War, as a failure.

Then fate draws the men together at a holdup, and Wade is captured with Evans' help. The desperate farmer joins the group guarding Wade on the three-day ride to the train station, with young William tagging along. They earn their hazard pay the hard way. They traverse territory controlled by hostile Indians, Wade's gang is in hot pursuit, and the captive outlaw remains a force to contend with. Wade tempts Evans with bribes, appeals to his instinct for self-preservation, probes his weaknesses, offers him every excuse to turn his back and let Wade keep robbing the railroads.

But Evans isn't guarding the outlaw just to save his farm from foreclosure. He's sticking to his guns to shore up unreliable frontier justice and prove himself to William. Along the way, he impresses Wade, who proves more ambivalent and sentimental than his rap sheet would suggest.

The climax, a furious shootout, depends on a sudden twist of motivation as Evans and Wade race through a half-built frontier town in a temporary alliance. The turnabout might seem inappropriate, but the cleverly insinuating script has been planting hints all along. It takes not an arbitrary turn, but a surprising one, because people sometimes do surprising things.

Crowe is sadistically attractive as the suave desperado and Bale is a convincing portrait of bruised decency, but they're not the whole show. One of the great pleasures of westerns is the showcase they offer for character actors, and "3:10 to Yuma" has a pair of aces. Peter Fonda is stern and tough as a railroad security man gunning for Wade, while Ben Foster ("X-Men: The Last Stand") is powerfully creepy as the outlaw's gun-crazy second-in-command. The ghosts of Jack Palance and Lee Van Cleef are surely smiling.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186