K-SCORE: 60
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Writers: Nic Pizzolatto, Richard Wenk
Starring: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard, Haley Bennett
Spoiler Level: Last paragraph, major. Everything else, minor.
In the pie graph of all stories, westerns receive far too large a slice. I don’t really get it. I like gunfights, whiskey, and freedom, and I still don’t really get it. I’ve studied nothing but the genre in a film class and believe it or not I still don’t really get it. Why did they make so many of these in the days of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and the Italian studio spaghetti westerns? Why are they remaking them now?
“periodically you have to watch them play cards”
The Magnificent Seven is pretty good, but it does almost nothing to innovate within the confines of its genre. Only two types of stories: man goes on a journey and stranger comes to town. It’s the strangers coming to town in this. They’re one-dimensional strangers and they’re fighting for or against a fairly shitty town. If you had to write the screenplay, you’d know of a few scenes you’d have to insert before the climax where the magnificent seven men actually fight the army. Well, this film does decently well at making those scenes entertaining. You know, where the bounty hunting gunslinger walks into the local saloon and proves his worth by hip-firing some backwater street scum. Where they recruit the local native tribesman and gain his trust by showing surprising cultural understanding for his people given the time period. Where they find one of their more eccentric members in a betting ring circle fight. Did I say eccentric? I meant Asian. Anyway all those are fine. And the climax is fine. It’s just that constitutes about an hour and ten minutes of a film. So periodically you have to watch them play cards or talk about olden times during the war or teach a local widow how to shoot precious bullets at a dead log. Thus, The Magnificent Seven remake is a bit boring, if fairly well-made.
Sarsgaard is terrible. Denzel Washington is a man on fire in the old west, which I guess means next he’ll be a man on fire in ancient Rome, followed by a man on fire in space, followed by a man on fire in hell, which will be really interesting because hell is basically one big fire. Vincent D’Onofrio makes some weird choices, but compelling ones. And Chris Pratt gets to blow something up, it’s just maybe not what he wanted to blow up. The only real question the story poses that tickles at the back of your mind, though, is which of these seven are going to die. I think it’s nice that they made the very progressive choice to kill every last white character.