On the journey -- which involves a trip through dangerous Indian territory and a run-in with a violent bunch of railroad tunnelers -- we meet the various colorful characters that are staples of all incarnations of the Western genre. Making the biggest impression is Ben Foster as the second-in-command of Wade's gang, a snarling, exceedingly violent twentysomething who hides any flaws behind a cold-blooded ruthlessness. Purposely not given as much dimension as the two leads, he's a fun character because of his simplicity. Among Dan's posse are great actors such as Peter Fonda as a hypocritical bounty hunter, Dallas Roberts as a snobbish businessman who wants Ben dead so he'll stop disrupting his business, and Alan Tudyk as a town doctor who gets roped in. There are plenty of casualties along the way, to be sure, but admirably, the plot doesn't necessarily follow the formula of killing off the least famous actors first.

And then there's the subplot involving Dan's son William (Logan Lerman), who sees his dad as an ineffectual coward, especially compared to the charismatic Ben. Here I was afraid the movie would take the tired route of either (a) the son screws everything up for his dad, or (b) he unwittingly saves the day, but the plot thankfully doesn't follow either of those simplistic formulas. Our initial inclination is to hate William (how dare you disrespect your dad, don't you know that's Christian Bale?) but he turns out to be a competent young man who thankfully isn't used as a pawn to create any big melodramatic scene (like, for example, Heath Ledger's character in The Patriot). The film definitely ends up with the father/son dynamic as a main theme, but it actually feels earned, providing an answer, as Dan faces almost certain death in Contention, why he's doing this.

The shootouts, chases, and brawls in the film are shot with a clarity missing from a lot of action films these days; director James Mangold allows us to actually see what's going on instead of providing a few incomprehensible shots of arms and legs moving. We understand the sequence of events and can thus be fully entertained by it. That all falls apart somewhat in the last big action setpiece, as Dan escorts Ben through the alleys and buildings of Contention while almost the whole town, led by Ben's gang, tries to shoot him. Here we lose our perspective, and worse, there are too many moments where the bad guys miss just because the script says they have to. Up until this point, all of the gunplay in the film was dealt with realistically, so the implausibility of the climactic battle was a bit of a disappointment.

The fates of the characters I will certainly ...