There isn’t a pressing need to remake The Magnificent Seven in 2016, nor was there a need to remake 1954’s Seven Samurai into a Western in 1960. I not only love it, but I’ve always enjoyed its Americanized remake, the 1960 classic western “The Magnificent Seven”, and Roger Corman’s entry into the post-“Star Wars” sci-fi boom, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, which is an homage to both.
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The Training Day director’s new film, The Magnificent Seven, opens this weekend (23-25Sep16) in America and he already has his sights on another revamp – this time it’s Brian De Palma’s 1983 epic, which starred Al Pacino as violent Cuban drug lord Tony Montana.
Rose Creek is a small town mostly comprised of farmers.
Bogue is the consummate villain – willing to bring guns into a church and force people to sell their land at gunpoint so he can turn their farms into mines.
Matthew’s widow, Emma (Haley Bennett), leaves town to find someone who will be her town’s champion.
Under the direction of Antoine Fuqua, this modern remake has its fair share of violence (it is a western after all), but it’s not gratuitous, and the humor sprinkled throughout helps balance out the violence. Fuqua may not be the most inventive of directors-he pans up bodies so many times it becomes comical- but he’s spent most of his career making action films, and the prospect of remaking the greatest fight scene of all time (Seven Samurai, not the Sturges film) seems to have fired him up. “Impossible”, replies Chisolm. “How many you got so far?” asks Faraday. Yet, it somehow remains engrossing.
Therefore, despite all the star power, charisma and dusty heroism on-screen, viewers struggle to care about any of it. Sam Chisolm is a lot like Robert McCall, his character in Fuqua’s version of “The Equalizer”.
What’s magnificent here is D’Onofrio, who has taken on a Wellesian girth that lends his isolated mountain man the air of Falstaff, albeit a Falstaff that speaks a barely intelligible language seemingly known only to him. Since he’s surrounded by others with various personalities, especially Pratt’s nonchalant gambler, Chisolm isn’t as intense as McCall. “You can’t do the same thing every era”, says Fuqua. “They just hit it off immediately”. They’re all the kind who would have “Neutral” as their alignment on a D&D character sheet. Once again, it boils down to casting. When I heard that novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto (Galveston, HBO’s True Detective) would work on the script, I think I even got goose bumps. This may have been due to the nature of the central conflict.
This is way more selfless than taking out a ruthless businessman. “And the nagging feeling, pardner, you really should have just rented the original instead”. The bandits in the original were just taking too much of the town’s supplies, so that there was nearly not enough left to allow the farmers to survive. But it’s diverting in about the way you’d expect of a remake twice removed – call it a perfectly competent seven. At one point, I wondered who was left to kill?
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Should you go? Sure. All’s well, on that front.
