3:10 to Yuma

Grade: B

My favorite Westerns are the ones that flip the testosterone, formulaic genre on its head. John Ford's The Searchers is great for taking an unflinching look at racism, and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar rules because it throws men on the sideline and focuses on a a battle royale between two headstrong gals played to bitchy perfection by Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. Most recently, of course, Brokeback Mountain broke free of the genre's conventions by pitting guy on guy in the amorous sense, not the High Noon gun duel sense.

James Mangold's new remake of the 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma won't be joining my list of favorite Westerns because it offers no interesting twists. It's extremely well-made, mind you, with great performances from Christian Bale and Peter Fonda (Russell Crowe is fine, but he's done the bad guy shtick so many times that it's getting a bit old). The cinematography is sumptuous, with sun-drenched vistas of the desert and beautiful twilight shots, too. The whole enterprise feels way too familiar, however, and several plot points are just plain stooooo-pid. If Crowe's character, Ben Wade, is such a freakin' threat to Western civilization, why don't the law men just shoot him dead instead of endangering six lives to bring him to a train station that's hundreds of miles away? And they don't even shackle Ben's feet, making his multiple getaways all the easier.

3:10 to Yuma is just fine for what it is, but it's pretty depressing that it's generating a lot of Oscar buzz when Tommy Lee Jones's witty and heartbreaking 2005 Western The Three Burials of Melquides Estrada didn't fetch a single nomination.