I was able to see it this week and here is my thoughts on it. Industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) and his gang have been terrorizing a small town named Rose Creek. With their lives in jeopardy, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) and other desperate residents employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers, and hired guns: Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), Josh Farraday (Chris Pratt), Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Billy Rocks (Lee Byung-hun), Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and Red Harvest. In 1960, the Mexican villagers could travel north to hire their mostly white American mercenaries, and come back down with them, unimpeded by any Trump wall.
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I think it will happen. There is a lot of blood, a ton of death and some characters die who I wish had lived.
The new version of The Magnificent Seven plays out as a straightforward oater with plenty of colorful characters and even more colorful action. It’s a good decision: that joyous, leaping tune wouldn’t have suited this gritty remake. However, by bringing a good tempo and a flawless dose of humour, The Magnificent Seven will keep you present without a shadow of a doubt. And even if said Western is a remake of a classic, chances are that the 2016 cinema-goer has not seen either the Kurosawa film or the 1960 remake. That this resonant a message comes in such a wildly weird and amusing package is just about as oddly pleasant as you can imagine. His greed seems to know no bounds and more modern films need a bad guy like this. There are some extended shootouts that are wildly exciting, but the movie drags quite a bit early on, taking too much time to get to the meat of the story. Anyone who saw the original won’t forget Elmer Bernstein’s grandly heroic theme music, which, more than any other component, elevated John Sturges’s cowboy movie to classic status. There are plenty of moments in the final scenes where things go haywire and it is hard to tell what will happen next. They’re all relatively logical, given the time period, but it’s definitely not something you’d expect to find in a traditional Western.
The Magnificent Seven is in the business of killing, and business is good!
If I had to chose favourites, I would actually go for Rajkumar Santoshi’s underrated China Gate, over both The Magnificent Seven films.
That diversity would be more admirable if the casting didn’t feel as calculated as everything else about this exercise – created to help sell the movie to different demographics and global territories. His “Training Day” co-star Ethan Hawke is given one of the movie’s more interesting parts, but he doesn’t seem to be able to do much with it. They are all willing to do everything they can to try to stop this wicked man. The action scenes are well-staged if deeply impersonal – in fact, much of the film feels rote and mechanical, less a vibrant throwback to vintage Westerns and more a marketing campaign in search of meaning.
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However, after the speech, The Magnificent Seven falls into mediocrity.
