9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I am not a big fan of westerns, per se. As a kid, I enjoyed playing cowboys and indians as much as the next white bread kid on the block, but as an adult (I spit a little whenever I say that dirty word), the whole cowboy schtick feels way overdone in the realm of movies. It is a genre so full of cliche’s, that it has transcended cliche into some uber-realm of cliche-parody-cliche’s. Oh, trust me, I know that doesn’t make much sense. And that is my point. Westerns just don’t make much sense anymore. Logically, culturally, emotionally… John Wayne would not be doing Westerns anymore if he was alive.

(Side note: Imagine a young John Wayne replacing Keanu Reeves as the young everyman in the Matrix. Discuss.)

I watched 3:10 to Yuma over the weekend. And while it was a tragic and brutal and full of unbridled amounts of tension, it also did something I was not really expecting from a remake.

It made me think.

3:10 to Yuma has bad guys, but the not bad guys you expect. It has good guys, but not the good guys that make you want to cheer. The tension is well done, well paced, and overall the movie just sucks you in. It addresses moral issues as a very real, accessible level for all of us. It doesn’t give us villains and heroes in the traditional sense (plenty of the side characters do fulfill those traditional roles), but it does give us men who seem to think, characters that actually transcend the situation they are in.

They portray more than just a western, they portray a conflict of perhaps real people and real questions about what it is to be hero and what it is to be a villain.

It all depends on the circumstances… the world is just shades of gray.

And for that alone, it was a great movie. But there was so much more that made it even better.

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale both deliver great performances, the cinematography is killer, and the climatic payoff at the end is so worth the lost fingernails chewed off through the movie.

But its not a movie I could watch twice. Just because it is brutal. And the effects team definitely shows it off with lavish.