The Magnificent Seven (12A)
Three stars
Dir: Antoine Fuqua
With: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke
Running time: 132mins
IN remaking The Magnificent Seven, Antoine Fuqua not only pays homage to John Sturges’s iconic 1960 classic - itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai - but also tips his hat to everyone from Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone to Sam Peckinpah.
The result is a deeply affectionate Western homage that entertains on its own terms without ever coming close to the timeless legacy of those it seeks to honour.
Nevertheless, Denzel Washington fills the boots of the late Yul Brynner in typically authoritative fashion, and provides a suitably enigmatic presence, while Chris Pratt opts for cheeky but endearing wit over the inherent cool that Steve McQueen brought to his role.
They are the two men who provide the catalyst for bringing the seven together after Washington’s no-nonsense lawman Sam Chisolm is approached by the widow (Haley Bennett) of a farmer to help her town rid them of the threat posed by ruthless land-owner Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) and his murderous henchmen.
Along for the ride are Pratt’s card shark Josh Faraday, Ethan Hawke’s lethal marksman Goodnight Robicheaux and his knife-wielding partner Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), Vincent D’Onofrio’s former Indian hunter Jack Horne, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Mexican bandit Vasquez and Martin Sensmeier’s renegade Native American Red Harvest.
Given the multi-cultural make-up of this seven, it’s disappointing that the script, by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk, doesn’t make more imaginative use of the possibilities or tensions offered by such a mixed bunch as it does in applying such great names to several of its characters. Rather, such tensions are only really hinted at by way of throwaway banter, much like the back stories of its main players, with both Washington’s personal connection to the mission and Hawke’s ghosts of the past only touched upon belatedly and all too fleetingly.
The same can be said for Sarsgaard’s villain, who also lacks much presence or complexity despite a strong start. Whereas Eli Wallach’s bandit leader was at least driven by the need to feed his own men as much as being bad for the sake of it, Bogue is a tyrant driven solely by greed (a metaphor for the banks or, according to Hawke, Donald Trump?). He’s a man willing to sacrifice his own men in order to get his way. But he’s also disconnected, late on, appearing seemingly high and thereby lacking any real grit.
It’s a shortcoming of Fuqua’s film that while borrowing from the greats, the director doesn’t necessarily learn from them. For this Magnificent Seven also lacks the warm characterisation of Sturges’s film, or the ability to really say something about the West in the way that Peckinpah or Leone did.
It exists on a more superficial level, content merely to wink to Western iconography. Washington’s first appearance, for instance, looks eerily reminiscent of Eastwood’s arrival in High Plains Drifter, while the coats donned by Bogue’s henchmen are virtually identical to those worn by the killers in Pale Rider. The final confrontation, meanwhile, sets up the exact same kind of scenario as the last stand in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and then unleashes the bloodshed in a style of which Peckinpah would be proud, albeit minus the actual blood. Even Washington’s history, once revealed, owes more than a passing debt to the type of mystical figure of revenge/justice that Eastwood portrayed in his Westerns.
And yet for all of its flaws, The Magnificent Seven does still succeed on a lot of levels - maybe even more so for those not familiar with the original. There is still an emotional investment in the characters that has sorely been missing from a lot of modern blockbusters, with this particular suicide squad prone to human frailty and even death. Not all of them make it and the order in which they fall isn’t predictable.
While the action is also well choreographed so that you can actually see what’s going on, Mauro Fiore’s cinematography lends the film a visual splendour that demands a big screen, while the score, by James Horner and Simon Franglen, repeatedly toys with Elmer Bernstein’s magnificent original before finally dropping it over the end credits.
Taken on its own terms, Fuqua’s film does a much better job of revisiting an all-time great than anyone would dared to have imagined when the project was first announced.
ROB CARNEVALE
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