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The western is dead, shot down like a liver-bellied coward at high noon — or round about the time John Wayne bought the farm and Michael Cimino's 'Heaven's Gate' flop sent a film studio to its grave.

Since the early '80s the tradition of hoss-ridin', tabaccy-chewin', six-shooter-totin' cowboys fighting Injuns and knocking back whiskeys at the Tombstone saloon has been replaced by little more than tumbleweed blowing through the desert that the genre has become.

Every once in a while a film comes along — Lawrence Kasdan's 'Silverado', Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven' — that's hailed as the great saviour of the Wild West, welcomed like the Lone Ranger sweeping into town, all guns blazin', with the promise of a new beginning. But it's not long before the well runs dry, Miss Kitty's Whorehouse goes out of business, and we're left with dross like Sharon Stone's 'The Quick And The Dead', and Kevin Costner's interminable 'Wyatt Earp'. That Jackie Chan's 'Shanghai Noon' is the best western of the past decade tells you how bad and ugly — with no trace of the good — it's all become.

Times are now so desperate, they've actually placed the great American dream in the hands of a Welshman (Christian Bale) and an Aussie (Russell Crowe), with 'Stateside critics even raving — saviour, Lone Ranger, blazin' guns — about the interlopers' '3:10 To Yuma'.

But, once again, the fuss seems rather unnecessary. True, James Mangold's remake of the 1957 Glenn Ford classic gallops along, the pace rarely flagging as he carefully recreates the hardships of 1870s Arizona. But the film stumbles. Genre clichés abound in the straightforward tale of a down-on-his-luck rancher (Bale) who agrees to escort a captured outlaw (Crowe) to the titular train. And, almost fatally, the vital central relationship between its two leads lacks credibility. The screenplay is so heavy-handed in creating rounded characters — the baddie isn't all bad; the goodie is troubled and grumpy — that they remain stereotypes who bond unconvincingly over some forced dialogue.

Their relationship never seems like a to-the-ends-of-the-earth type, really undermining the final Shakespearean shootout, giving the themes of sacrifice and heroism all the weight of a cactus thorn. Yet despite this critical lack of connection between them, individually the film's stars do their best with the material. Crowe's Ben Wade is a lightning rod — lethal killer, playful flirt, and astute businessman — and certainly a step up from the actor's previous Western outing as an excuse for Stone to uncross her legs. Bale, meanwhile, broods with his usual intensity, a bitter Civil War veteran who just can't get no respect from his wife and son. Feeling equal parts threatened, disgusted and enamoured by the outlaw, his Dan Evans has the potential to be genuinely conflicted. But Mangold will have none of that — morally upstanding (and frankly dull), it's soon apparent the rancher is little more than a symbol for the veterans of the Iraq War.

That's hardly groundbreaking either — Eastwood's 'Unforgiven' took the political allegory route nearly 20 years ago — which underlines one of the film's biggest problems: '3:10 To Yuma' really isn't as clever or as original as it thinks it is.

So once the hype has died down, the tumbleweed no doubt will return.