Do yourselves a favour and watch this Western. It's absolutely masterful.
For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's based on an Elmore Leonard story and is in theatres right now. If I somehow have to convince you beyond that sentence, I suppose I can summarise the premise. Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is an Arizona rancher, down on his luck due to a drought and in debt to the railroad company who are going to kick him off of his land within the week. By a sequence of events best attributed to poor luck, he finds himself helping capture and then helping deliver to Contention, AZ, the outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe). Unfortunately, Wade's gang has other ideas.
The filmmakers clearly took into account everything produced by pillars of the genre like Ford, Peckinpah, Leone and Eastwood; however, where lesser folk would merely turn the film into a simulacrum of those other pictures, stealing setpieces and nicking dialogue, Mangold has taken what he's learned and applied it to create a stunning and memorable piece of cinema. There was literally not a single moment where my eyes left the screen save for one brief second where I turned to one of my companions for the evening to see if he shared in my excitement for the scene which was about to come. (And even that scene defied my expectations, seeing where they were set and demanding that I raise them immediately or face the consequences.)
Each member of the cast pulls out an extraordinary performance for what could have easily become, in the hands of less capable actors, rote performances. Bale and Crowe carve out truly great characters, but the supporting cast does an outstanding job as well. Of special note are the performances of Logan Lerman as Dan's son, William, Ben Foster as the creepy, ruthless right-hand man of Wade and Alan Tudyk in a surprisingly endearing role as a small-town doctor who becomes a member of the posse escorting Wade to his destination.
I cannot stress enough how excellent this film is. A dusty wind blows passionate, exciting, clever and just damn expert filmmaking out of every frame. It's a film which meets its audience's expectations and then exceeds them by leaps and bounds. It deserves your money.
