Not great western

3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on his way home? Do we need milk? Cat food?

But the result is both dull and deeply unnecessary; a stinker. This is a remake of the 1957 film of the same name (starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin) and while life is too short to get all het up about remakes — there is nothing holy about old films; it’s not like drawing a moustache on the ‘Mona Lisa’ — what is the point, if you can’t re-frame it in some new way for a fresh audience? Hairspray, for example, did that quite wonderfully. But here the script is so out-dated and passé there’s barely a line that doesn’t go not just to the brink of cliché, but also well over it and on to the next brink.