Sagnificent Seven

Over the last year, we’ve had something of a Western resurgence, easily one of my favorite genres. So I was pretty excited for Antoine Fuqua’s take on the John Sturges classic The Magnificent Seven (1960). A wild west rendering of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the story of powerless villagers hiring gunslingers to defend their town from evil men works well across many environments, even deep space, as in 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars. As we saw with last years’ The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Bone Tomahawk, Westerns can still connect with audiences and deliver primal, pulp storytelling, with antagonists facing off against the backdrop of the wild frontier. Sadly, Fuqua’s well-intentioned remake isn’t nearly in the same class as those other films.

 

Denzel Washington takes on the Yul Brynner role (and black garb), while Chris Pratt riffs off of Steve McQueen’s cantankerous ne’er-do-well. Ethen Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio, round out the mercenary mob, with Martin Sensmeier, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Byung-hun Lee providing backup diversity – and that’s really part of the problem with Seven. Fuqua is to be commended for bringing a diverse ethnic sensibility to the film – but the script never does their varied makeup any justice as characters. The character work in Seven is one of its weakest elements. Sensmeier and Lee exude tremendous charisma as Native American and Asian recruits, but other than “The elders say I’m on a different path,” and being good with knives, these two are brooding cyphers. Garcia-Rulfo has the thankless designation of Mexican Outlaw. This is a likable cast, but they’re woefully underserved by the script (Richard Wenk and Nic Pizzolatto).

 

Haley Bennett is the town’s voice who recruits the Seven as protectors, who seems cast mainly due to a resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence. If The Magnificent Seven was more fun, much of the sketchiness here could be forgiven, but unfortunately the film plays out in dreary, overbearing, and all too perfunctory fashion. The death blow is Peter Sarsgaard’s land-grabbing villain, played as a man seemingly driven by heavy-lidded boredom.  He drags himself through scenes with lethargic flippancy, letting all the air of menace escape from the balloon. His character is a yawning misfire.

 

If you want to see a film where the director has boundless enthusiasm for the genre, go back and check out Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995). It’s brisk, faithful to a legion of tropes, and makes even the most hastily glimpsed characters memorably vivid, while always maintaining a sense of fun. It’s one of the countless, more engaging westerns that kept popping up for me while The Magnificent Seven mechanically unspooled. Pale Rider, Django Unchained, Tombstone – and Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado. I’m betting Antoine Fuqua’s watched Silverado a lot, and you can sense him gamely trying to evoke a similar dynamic contrast between scenic grandeur and bullet-firing mayhem.

But for whatever reasons, this iteration of The Magnificent Seven just doesn’t stay with you. When the considerable gunsmoke finally clears, you’re likely to find that disappointment is what’s left standing.