After watching Russell Crowe in hero mode a few nights back in American Gangster, it was fun to see him in all-out bad guy mode. He’s one of the few actors around that has the gravitas to make you fully believe him in either role, and it’s fun to watch him stretch those impressive muscles. Here in 3:10 to Yuma, he plays one of the great western villains in Ben Wade. Until a third act slip-up nearly ruins his character and the entire movie. (Which, I’ll write about in full spoiler mode below.) I was enjoying the film and his character so much up till that point, that despite the total flaw, I tried to overlook it and enjoy the film for all its other great moments.

3:10 to Yuma focuses on two characters, Russell’s Ben Wade, who’s a total hard ass, has zero compassion for human life, and leads a gang of ruffians with an iron fist. On the other side is Christian Bale’s Dan Evans, he’s the polar opposite; tries to do everything by the book and goes out of his way to avoid violence. But it’s a harsh world and on the inside he’s really a hard man, trying to be good, and he's hiding something about his past. In the opening scene of the film, his family’s barn is burned down by the local goons working for the rich land owner, who Dan owes money too. The next day, he’s taking his sons and the last of their cows on the way to town, when they run across the path of Ben and his gang, who are robbing a stage coach.

You can tell this is a new fangled western in this highly stylized action scene, the guys on the coach have a Gatling gun mounted to the back and fire away mercilessly, while the bad guys ride hard after them, one of them even exploding when they get hit, because of the dynamite in their pocket. The scene ends with the coach flipping in a fury of dust and strewn bodies. The whole thing feels more like a car chase from a Bourne movie, than anything resembling the traditional western.

Ben shows a bit of compassion by letting Dan and his son's go and rides into town, where he is soon caught, due to his own arrogance. The railroad man, who’s coach was just robbed, offers a group of untrained men a reward if they get Ben on the 3:10 to Yuma train, taking Ben to prison. A doctor, one of the goons who burned Dan’s barn down, a Pinkerton who was the last left from the coach, and Dan who just walked into town. Dan wants to do the right thing, but also wants the $200 to save his family’s ranch. Through some good trickery the group manages to send Ben’s gang in the wrong direction, buying them some time, but still manage to run into a group of rogue Indians, some mining men that have it in for Ben, and Ben himself offers up all kinds of trouble on their trip to Yuma, and not everybody makes it there alive. Dan keeps alive thanks to an unlikely one-sided friendship with Ben, who sees Dan as a kindred spirit in some way.

The film offers up a nice simple western story, 6 unprepared men, taking one of the most dangerous men alive across the desert. The film is very nicely put together with a modern western flair, beautifully shot in cinemascope, it looks pretty authentic, with everybody’s dusty and dirty, plenty of hard horse riding and six guns a blazing. Crowe makes Ben a charismatic villain with ice cold heart. Bale does his usual thing, going all out, looking the dirtiest and most beat up of the bunch. Ben Foster has a blast playing Ben’s right hand man, a maniacal gunman, without an ounce of pity. Peter Fonda has his best role in years as the Pinkerton, who’s run in with Ben a few times before, but remains professionally pissed about it. I was totally into the story, and it’s put together so deftly, that I was really falling in love with the, until the story takes a completely unconvincing twist at the end. But it leads to another cool shoot-out in the streets of Yuma, so I wasn’t totally upset, but it nearly ruined this otherwise perfect western. – Grade: B-

(Spoilers ahead, I’m going to discuss the ending that nearly ruined the film.) Okay, so up until the very end of the film, Ben is a ruthless killer, willing to do anything to stay out of jail. When Dan reveals his secret about being injured by his own men in the war, Ben suddenly flips, changing from someone who'd do anything in his power to stay out of jail, to helping Dan get him on the train. Ben starts gunning down his own gang, and willingly puts himself on the train, even after Dan is dead. Sure, he’s mentioned that he’s escaped prison, but where’s the motivation; you don’t flip on a dime from ultimate bad guy, to decent fellow, with just a couple of words. It rang completely false.

Making a comedy compilation based on the Ten Commandments, is a wonderful idea. Actually pulling it off, is much tougher. The comedy group The State does an okay job with it in The Ten. Some of the skits are brilliant and had me laughing throughout, some of the other skits, not so much. But if you're a fan of offbeat comedies, you should check out the film for yourself.

The film suffers from constantly returning to a narrator character in the form of the usually funny Paul Rudd. He lives in some sort of black void with two huge stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. Between each story, we're taken back to him and the continuing story of him cheating on his wife, played by a game Famke Janssen. But it's not funny, and the film keeps returning there, dragging the film down instead of keeping a good rhythm. They should have found a better way to transition between the stories.

I'd say six-and-a-half of the stories are pretty funny. I found three of them to be particularly good. In thou shall not worship false idols: Adam Brody jumps out of an airplane without a parachute, he survives but is stuck up to his chest in the ground, if he's moved, he'll die. He becomes a celebrity for a short while, even getting his own sitcom. The whole idea of being famous for being stuck in the ground, and the image of Brody with his foot sticking awkwardly out of the ground near his head, is consistently funny.

In Thou Shall not take the Lord's name in vain: Gretchen Mol, who even knew she could be funny, plays a Librarian who takes an extended trip to Mexico, where she falls in love with the resurrected Jesus. She has a torrid love affair with him, repeatedly calling out his name, while they're having sex. Jesus is played by the always cool Justin Theroux. In Keep the Sabbath sacred: A guy refuses to go to church, instead comes up with the idea of Naked Sundays. His idea is so beloved, his house is soon full of guys skipping church to frolic naked while listening to the sultry sounds of Roberta Flack. The skit ends with a hilarious song about nakedness.

There's some decent stuff with Winona Ryder falling in love with a ventriloquist dummy. A semi funny bit about the usually deadly, serious Liev Schreiber, coveting his neighbors cat-scan machines, until both their houses are full of them. And some really lame skits about a doctor killing somebody on a goof and then getting repeatedly prison raped. The film is all over the place and with some of the stories, they're really stretching for any relevance to the actual Commandments.

The Ten has an amazing cast; and everybody throws themselves into these goofy roles full throttle. But the writing is where the film suffers, sometimes the jokes hit a home run, but a lot more of them strike out. I thought that The State's previous film: Wet Hot American Summer, was a much better film, better told and more consistently funny. If you haven't seen that film, I suggest it instead. If you've seen it, you could do worse than The Ten, but hopefully they do a lot better with their next film.