'The Magnificent Seven' remake is good fun, but leaves us wondering what could have been
Antoine Fuqua's remake of the 1960 Western, about a group of castoffs banding together to save a town, is shallow fun. Nothing wrong with that, but you get the feeling it could have been more.
- Washington is always worth watching, even when he's this stoic
- Too many of the supporting characters are cardboard cutouts from generic Westerns
“Magnificent” isn’t really accurate, but no one would go see a movie called “The Pretty Good Seven,” probably.
So here we are with “The Magnificent Seven,” Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960 film, which was itself a reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s classic “Seven Samurai.” The cast, led by Denzel Washington, is impressive. The basics of the story are solid: A town hires some unsavory sorts to protect itself from a psychopathic land thief. (Maybe they should be called a basket of deplorables.)
Why isn’t it great, then?
Would you settle for “fun?”
For one thing, the film has a bit of a thrown-together feel. That’s part of the point – these are seven people who come together not through friendship or the common good or whatever. They’re hired guns making a buck – they don’t have to be friends (though some are). And in a movie with this many characters, it’s inevitable that some will get short shrift. The problem here is that too many do.
RELATED: Peter Sarsgaard can scare you with nothing but silence | New movies this week: 'Magnificent Seven, 'Goat' | Our big guide to fall movies
Things To Do app: Get the best in events, dining and travel right on your device
On the other hand, I’d be entertained just watching Denzel Washington sit there on a horse. Your mileage may vary – and you should know that for what seems like an outsized part of the movie, he does just that. (He’s a brooding sort.)
The film begins with the greedy, brutal Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) forcing the people of the Old West town of Rose Creek to part with their land, ripping them off with a paltry offer. If they refuse? Well, he shoots a few people in the street and burns down the church on his way out of town to give them a couple of weeks to think about it.
Law-enforcement is under Bogue’s control, so the townspeople will have to seek other remedies. The newly widowed Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett), searching for help in other towns, runs across Sam Chisolm (Washington), a black-hatted bounty hunter who takes the job, which seems like a suicide mission (Bogue employs a group the size of a small army for all sorts of nasty business). Chisolm has his reasons, as they say (often, in a movie like this).
He’ll enlist the services of Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), a gambler and drinker and sure shot; Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), a legendary Civil War sharpshooter known as the Angel of Death; Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), a seemingly insane outdoorsman; Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee), nifty with a knife and pals with Goodnight; Vaquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a bandit; and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), a Native American equipped with all the clichéd fighting skills you’ve seen any Native American have in any movie, ever.
Clichés abound, in fact; you won’t see much here that you haven’t seen in any number of Westerns.
Except for the diversity. Now that’s new – a black protagonist and several people of color filling out the ranks is something typically not found in a traditional Western. It’s a welcome change, but Fuqua doesn’t go much deeper than that. We learn late in the game why Chisolm signed on, and Goodnight has a haunting backstory. But everyone else just sort of exists, expert fighters who could have wandered in from any other Western, picked up a gun and starting firing.
Once they arrive back in Rose Creek, the assembled gang teaches the hapless residents how to defend themselves. It’ll be an uphill battle, they know. It’s all building toward a showdown, of course, and Fuqua does not skimp on the final battle. (Among Bogue’s weapons: a Gatling gun, devastatingly lethal.)
Otherwise “The Magnificent Seven,” at least in this telling, is content to skim the surfaces. Surely there was a nod to contemporary predatory lending practices to be found in Bogue’s crooked dealings? There’s no question diversity could have played a bigger role in the story.
Again, it’s a fun movie, a nicely made Western in which bad guys get to be good guys sometimes. Maybe that should be enough, but you can’t help wanting more.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.
MORE AZCENTRAL ON SOCIAL: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest
'The Magnificent Seven' 3.5 stars out of 5
Director: Antoine Fuqua.
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke.
Rating: PG-13 for extended and intense sequences of Western violence, and for historical smoking, some language and suggestive material.
Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★
Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★