ELMORE LEONARD IS NOT A HACK

OR: RENTAL OF THE MONTH
3:10 To Yuma gets at all those Batman themes in that rarest of imperfectible genres, “the Western.” Exploiting the hoariest of cliches, Russell Crowe plays the baddass like a carney barker, but Bale bores a hole in him with his eyes, and by the end it’s less a surprise twist shootout than exquisitely delayed tension. Man those guys worked that script …to the bone (Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt, and Derek Haas): “Sometimes a man has to be big enough to see how small he is…”