Greydanus and McCracken on "3:10 to Yuma"

Steven D. Greydanus guns down James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma:

The original believed that a man was a man whether he was an outlaw or a law-abiding citizen, and core human and social values applied to all. The remake sees men as either wolves or sheep — those who take what they want if they choose, and those who are the helpless victims of their caprice and whims.

But Brett McCracken’s okay with it.

In the end, Yuma portrays a West that is stark, barren, and morally ambiguous. Like all the great “revisionist westerns” of recent years (Unforgiven, The Proposition), very few characters are all good or all bad. Everyone is a mixture (just as Evans and Wade are, in a way, two sides of the same coin) and everyone has an opportunity to change, to redeem whatever rotten past they came from.