Aside from introducing some new characters and taking a couple of narrative detours, Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma honors both the storyline and spirit of Daves' film, which starred Van Heflin and Glenn Ford in the roles now played by Bale and Crowe, respectively. Set in the harsh, unforgiving Arizona territory a few years after the Civil War, the film introduces us to Dan Evans (Bale), a struggling rancher and former Union Army sharpshooter who lost a foot in battle. Mired in debt and his land parched by drought, Dan can barely provide for his wife Alice (Gretchen Mol) and two sons, Will (Logan Lerman) and Mark (Benjamin Petry), yet he refuses to abandon his property, despite the violent tactics of the ranch deed-holder to drive him off.

For Dan, a stoic and deeply principled man troubled by the knowledge that his oldest son Will views him as weak, it's vitally important that he find the money to pay off his debts and save the ranch. That opportunity arrives with the surprise capture of the Old West's most wanted outlaw, Ben Wade (Crowe), in the Arizona town of Bisbee. Lethally charismatic and lightening quick on the draw, Wade is a coldly calculating killer who inspires fanatical loyalty in his gang, most notably his sadistic second-in-command, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster). Although Prince and Wade's other men pose a formidable threat, Dan accepts a lucrative offer to join the posse escorting Wade from Bisbee to Contention, where they'll put the outlaw on the 3:10 train bound for Yuma's federal prison. Thus begins a dangerous trek over rugged, sun-baked terrain and through Apache strongholds that forges an unlikely bond between the morally upstanding rancher and the amoral outlaw.

Mangold's reverence for the thematic motifs and dramatic conventions of the classical western film genre informs every handsomely mounted frame of 3:10 to Yuma, which has a psychological heft and emotional gravitas reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), the last great western. Staging the action sequences with unstinting, sometimes grisly realism, Mangold doesn't romanticize the bloodshed. There are no stylized, balletic flourishes-no one dies in a slow-motion hail of bullets-as the five-man posse escorting Wade repeatedly comes under fierce attack. And no threat looms as large as Wade, a shrewd manipulator with an unerring ability to identify the various Achilles' heels of his captors (Peter Fonda, Dallas Roberts, Alan Tudyk, and Kevin Durand play the other members of the posse). Except, that is, for Dan, whose ongoing, psychological tug-of-war with Wade is riveting, thanks to the intense, tightly wound interplay between Bale and Crowe, two of the screen's most magnetic actors.

3:10 to Yuma isn't flawless. There are some developments in the final act skirting the edge of plausibility. Otherwise, it's a terrific, old-fashioned western, proof positive that sometimes, they do "make 'em like they used to."

— TIM KNIGHT