When it came to truly cold-blooded villains, though, Ben Foster as Charlie Prince totally blew me away. The hair on the back of my neck went up as soon as he stepped on stage, and within a minute I hated him.
The story is simple. Dan is struggling to make ends meet and bumps into Wade during an armored wagon job. Later, after taking Byron McElroy into town for medical attention, Dan confronts Hollander, the man who’s trying to run him off his land. When Hollander won’t give him an extension on his loan, Dan finds Wade and helps take him captive. Then he agrees to help transport him to Yuma for $200.
The movie quickly spins out into the action of the violent road trip. In addition to being one of the fastest gunmen around, Wade is also a skilled psychological warrior, constantly taunting his captors and seeking out their weaknesses.
The action involves traveling through hostile Indian lands, meeting up with a team of killers working the railroad coming through the area, and a final showdown in Yuma that is one of the most exciting I’ve ever seen in a Western.
For two hours, I sat marveling at the characters, then tensely awaiting the outcome of the latest danger they were all facing. Even then, the twists and turns of the characters, the back stories they were all hiding till the very last moment, were awesome. No one was quite who I thought they were.
Westerns succeed best by having good men with a history of bad violence and bad men who haven’t completely gone over to the dark side. 3:10 To Yuma is one of those.
One caveat I will offer to people who have seen the original movie starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, this version does not follow the same paths or end up the same way. Expect to be surprised and shocked at how things turn out. And you’ll be tense nearly the whole way through.
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