The 1960 film was itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samarai, but with a clever twist: It transposed that film’s sense of honor among thieves to the American West, to great effect.
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This seems like a simple movie to make-create a thirst for justice and then slake it.
“There’s a shorthand. There’s an excitement and expectation, a comfort level”, Washington said. After the town of Rose Creek is pillaged and burned by an evil land baron (Peter Sarsgaard), the defiant townsfolk, led by a grieving widow (Haley Bennett), hire Chisholm to pull together a gang of misfits to fight against the baron’s army. Ethan Hawke is the dashing slicker “Goodnight Robicheaux” an ex-Civil War sharpshooter with bad nerves, but the standout is Vincent D’Onofrio, who looks like Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight.
Character ace Vincent D’Onofrio has another scene-stealing role as a squeaky-voiced but lethal mountain trapper enlisted in the cause. The remake reunites Washington with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua.
In other words, westerns, while mostly predictable and cliche – including the original The Magnificent Seven – are usually packed with personality.
While Fuqua and most of his cast have mostly steered clear of talking much about the film’s “racial progression”, Hawke has stressed that The Magnificent Seven, with its rapacious industrialist and inclusive cast, joins an ever-growing list of present-day art meant to be read as a direct response to our Trump-ified present. A attractive young widow (Haley Bennett) implores Chisolm to help the Rose Creek folk fight back against Bogue.
Meanwhile, in the video below, Magnificent Seven star Denzel Washington reveals why he prefers to watch his films in a theatre with “regular folks”. Chisolm has a very understated yet powerful arc in the film, and it takes an actor like Washington to carry us along to a powerful finale with nothing but a hard stare and a deceptively cool, stoic, delivery. They finally play the original theme song to “The Magnificent Seven” after everyone is leaving the theater, so if you are a fan of the original theme song, stick around and you can hear it for about 30 seconds as you march out of the theater. But in taking up the cause of Emma and Rose Creek, they find redemption along the way. The IMAX screen is primarily used to give the feel of classic CinemaScope and director of photography Mauro Fiore lovingly films the western town and fields with great care. While there might be an intriguing moral wrapped in this violent package, without the human element urging the story forward, the “Magnificent Seven” turns out to be rather insignificant after all.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the characters, who fail to come alive despite some admittedly terrific performances: Hawke and Washington are particularly good as a gun-shy veteran and a steady-handed alpha male, respectively. I’ve had a friendship with him for 27 years and we’ve talked about him doing a franchise character, so when my partners and I got the rights to Equalizer, we were like, “Let’s get Denzel to finally do one”.
As modern Westerns go, “The Magnificent Seven” has enough juice to qualify as crowd-pleasing – with the cast bringing plenty to the table and Fuqua moving it all along briskly. If you plan to go, be prepared though.
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The cast is OK and does its job, but no more; without question, several, if not all, of the actors in the Sturges film oozed far more attitude.
