When you shoot the devil in the face… you’d better hope he’s not Russell Crowe.

Black hat, White hat, Gray souls…

Every way of man is right in his own eyes.
– Wade quoting the Book of Proverbs, 3:10 TO YUMA.

Every modern Western released after Eastwood’s mighty 1992 elegy has laid hollow claim to “The best western since UNFORGIVEN.”

3:10 TO YUMA is.

That’s because – like UNFORGIVEN – YUMA is not a “Western,” but an operatic tale set in the old west, balancing themes of honor, cowardice, heroism, paternalism, on the simplicity of the road movie, the buddy movie, with magnificent performances, nuanced, subtle, graceful and uncompromising.

Sexy Villain Poffy

Phew, my thesaurus is bloody…

A crippled rancher, Evans (Christian Bale), must escort notorious captured outlaw, Wade (Russell Crowe), miles into town to put him onboard the 3:10 p.m. prison train to Yuma… With all hell on their trail.

Sounds a bit Don La Fontaine (R.I.P.) – it’s actually Wade’s gang, led by maniacal Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), pursuing his boss with a single-mindedness bordering on homosexual.

Set in the 1880s, shortly after the Civil War, we meet rancher Evans (Bale), down on his luck, one foot lost to the war (in a heroic battle, he tells his sons), barely supporting a wife and two boys, staring into the abyss of a drought, while the local authorities constantly try to run him off his farm to make way for a railroad…

While Wade (Crowe) nonchalantly robs a bank stagecoach; a detached tyrant, Wade lets his men do the misdeeds while he draws pictures and moves in after the bloodletting. The savagery of his men washes over him without effect; he is well on his way to nihilism. Their loyalty means nothing: he emotionlessly guns down one of his gang taken hostage by the stagecoach driver, to remove the driver’s advantage – then he guns down the driver…Wade is so arrogant about his power and indifferent about his fate that he calmly rides into the town where the stagecoach was headed, has a drink and uses the fact that he looks exactly like Russell Crowe to seduce a bargirl into bed.

The lives of the outlaw and the rancher intertwine when Evans happens to be in town when Wade is captured, and accepts $200 to join the posse to escort Wade to the station. ($200 was exactly the amount the army paid for his shot-off foot. Analog with the Iraq war and the way America treats its war-wounded: Evans tells how the army gave out money not so the soldiers could walk away from the war recompensed, but so that the government could walk away from the soldiers, disavowing further responsibility.)

Peter Fonda (renowned for his iron horse, here riding a real one) is bounty hunter, Byron McElroy, so tough that after getting shot and having the bullet removed by a veterinarian, is ten minutes later taking Wade into custody and riding out of town with the posse.

3:10 TO YUMA is not about the train trip or the train – it is about the journey of the outlaw and the rancher, by road and by soul.

Remade from the 1957 film of the same name (with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, from a short story by Elmore Leonard), director James Mangold (from the great COP LAND to the not-so-great WALK THE LINE) elevates the somewhat clichéd 1950’s characters to multi-dimensional, complex people.

Wade is not the sneering black-hat villain of the original, and it is no accident seductive Russell Crowe plays him – charming, principled, educated; in a stopover at Evans’s homestead overnight, Wade easily wins over the rancher’s wife (Gretchen Mol), “I once knew the daughter of a sea captain. She had the greenest eyes I ever saw. Like yours. And I’d stare deep into them. And they’d just change color right in front of me. All the colors of the sea…” (Women love that kind of tongue-dancing, don’t they? It’s too easy.) The only way we can even identify Wade as the “villain” is – ironically – his black hat.

Evans is not the respected, upright do-gooder. The town officials resent him for not surrendering his land, and his family regards him as less than manly. In impassioned desperation, he tells his wife why he needs to endanger his life accompanying the outlaw to the train – redemption: “I’m tired of the way that my boys look at me. I’m tired of the way that you don’t.”

Evans’s son (Logan Lerman), enamored with the outlaw way, tails the posse originally to worship Wade, and ends up finding a new respect for his father in a shocking new ending to the original tale.

Nuance reaches a zenith in the film’s final scenes as Wade admits to Evans that he has been to Yuma prison twice, and escaped twice, and the ghost of a knowing smile flits across Evans’s face… He would win back his respect this day.

The 2007 YUMA ends on a more powerful note than the original and Mangold and new screenwriters, Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, create a moral dilemma where Wade and Evans realize they are more like each other than each would dare admit – principled men – and were it not for the circumstances they might well have been friends. A reckoning looms – the gauntlet run through the town, the rancher and the poet villain, the rancher’s boy, and the mad homosexual – and somehow, Wade and Evans both find redemption in the tragedy that unfolds.

In the scenes where Wade and Evans flee through the town, dodging bullets from Wade’s gang and the townsfolk alike, we step outside ourselves and think, “Jesus Christ – it’s Christian Bale and Russell Crowe! – megastars together onscreen!” Amazing how they lost themselves in their characters so completely. A Brit and an Aussie playing two Wild West Americans. How does that grab ya, Yanks?

Guess it’s still not as offensive as Chuck Connors playing GERONIMO.

END

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

Queasy Rider.

If there’s another word for idiocy, I think that word is GHOST RIDER.

Sloppy editing, juvenile direction and idiotic writing make this the number one feel-retarded movie of the year. And Nicolas Cage in eternal mourning-faced mode as the Ghost Rider doesn’t help any. He is stunt biker, Johnny Blaze, employed by the devil (Peter Fonda, embarrassing himself) to stop the devil’s son dominating the world. Oh yeh, and when he turns into Ghost Rider, his head turns into a flaming skull. For no reason other than it looks kinda cool.

Sam Elliott lends his balls-grit voice to the narration and appears as a supernatural gravedigger, but even that compounds the stupidity. His first lines narrate how every generation spawns a Ghost Rider, whose job is to collect souls sold to Satan. Okay, nice premise – now start confusing me… Seems the Wild West Ghost Rider (from the 1800s, I’m guessing) “outran the devil himself” because he didn’t want to collect 1000 souls on one particularly meaty contract.

Where to start with the stupid questions, knowing there’ll be stupid answers at the end of all of them? Is it within the Ghost Rider’s capacity to discern how many souls the devil should be bagging? He’s just an apprehender, a bounty hunter; it’s like bequeathing that redneck moron Dog the Bounty Hunter or one of those Nazi cops from COPS jurisprudence and the ability to execute sentences on nothing but their own cognizance, when we all know they are merely apprehenders with zero powers or intelligence beyond clicking on cuffs.

So what about the Rules for Supernatural Beings? How fast can the devil run? And since the Ghost Rider is a supernatural being himself, how fast was HE actually running to outrun the devil? And was he galloping across desert plains, or in some other dimension? If in some other dimension, were they “running” physically – with feet touching the ground for traction, or in some invisible medium? Please mail all answers to the building on the corner behind the imaginary goblin.

Every single minute of GHOST RIDER raises more idiotic questions about supernatural rules. For example, the GHOST RIDER is a supernatural being, so when evil supernatural beings fight him (beings fashioned from earth, air, fire and water), why do they bother punching each other? They’re not operating on the same rules we are in the physical plane – for cryin’ out loud, when a truck runs into the Ghost Rider he is unharmed, so why does the watery being even think he could debilitate Ghostie by punching him? Or hanging him by the neck with a chain?

Later, a supernatural being made of wind laughs when Ghost Rider tries to punch him, then he eats crow when the Rider whirls his whip around and somehow creates a vortex of fire that sucks the wind being into nothingness. Riiiiight…..

At one point, Ghost Rider saves a girl from a pursesnatcher (a very young Rebel Wilson) and then condemns the pursesnatcher to hell; I guess pursesnatching is a bad enough crime to warrant eternity in hell, it’s not as if the pursesnatcher had lied America into a false Iraq war, causing the deaths of 100,000 people and consigning Amierca to a trillion-dollar debt which four generations would have to shoulder. It’s the SUPERMAN conundrum: while the superhero saves a cat in a tree, a million African children are dying of starvation. Priorities like a dolphin, this Ghostie guy!

Marvel really screwed the pooch with this D-Lister; Stan Lee didn’t even bother making a cameo. The origin tale works gangbusters as a comicbook, but in this age of Marvel semi-realism (SPIDER-MAN, X-MEN, PUNISHER), GHOST RIDER gasps for credibility with its insanely convoluted mythical storyline and rule-less landscape.

Frumpy Eva Mendes is Johnny Blaze’s long-suffering romantic interest; Wes Bentley‘s performance as the devil’s son is so watery it resembles American beer; and Donal Logue tries overacting to save the movie. Didn’t work, but at least he’s got some cheese for his demo reel.

END

On The Road To Nowhere.

There is only one good thing in WILD HOGS: Peter Fonda. And he’s a cameo ten minutes before the end.

Naif director Walt Becker helms this listless, laughless tale of four suburban friends pushing middle-age crisis who hit the open road as wannabe bikers to taste “freedom” and come smack up against real bikers and get their asses kicked, learning the obligatory life-lessons about friendship, loyalty and how to take an ass-kicking.

John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy are four solid friends, Sunday riders who decide to hit the open road on their weekend machines to alleviate the boredom of their suburban existences. Unfortunately, it does nothing to alleviate OUR boredom.

Calling themselves Wild Hogs, due to Allen’s wife having sewed the patches onto their leathers, they eschew their safe coffeehouses (where every faux biker pretends toughness before discussing chamomile and chiffon) for the dangerous freeway, where bugs, crows and curbs are their greatest enemies….

The banal gay gags and indolent plot come to a screeching halt when the four come across a real bike gang called the Del Fuegos, led by Ray Liotta, who send them packing. Travolta accidentally blows up the Del Fuego bar, which brings down a vendetta on the four Sundays. Trying to hide in a small town, they are discovered and get the aforementioned chamomile kicked out of them, with Travolta overacting enough for Charlton Heston to call and tell him to dial it down to a 7.

Just as Liotta is about to deliver the justifiable and wholly welcome killing stroke on our Sundays, warning them “Stay off the road! It’s my highway!” Peter Fonda, as an O.G., thunders up and saves the necks of the Sundays, rasping at Liotta, “It’s MY highway!”

And everything is cool. And that’s all I want to remember of this joyless joyride.

END