- Culture
- 06 Oct 16
A remake of a remake, Anotoine Fuqua’s suicide-superhero-squad style western is based on John Sturges’ 1960 classic of the same name; itself a remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. With such revered origins - not to mention the vainglorious nature of the title - one would expect a modern masterpiece. So why does this star-studded shoot-out feel so stale?
Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke head up the eponymous group of gunslingers, cowboys and bounty hunters. The mission of this surprisingly good-natured group is to take down a greedy mining industrialist (Peter Sarsgaard), who is ready to bankrupt and murder innocent farmers in order to get his gold.
Despite Washington’s star power and Hawke’s suitably devilish facial hair, Pratt really emerges as the star. Charming, wry and infectiously excitable, it is he who elevates the now ubiquitous squad formula and generic shoot-outs. As the choreography feels overly stylised without ever being innovative, it’s Pratt’s glee that makes the film fun – not the action itself.
The Magnificent Seven makes a deliberate effort to be diverse, also featuring Asian knife aficionado Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), proud Comanche Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), temperamental “Texican” bandit Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and religious frontiersman Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio).
The diversity of the lead cast in a traditionally white genre, paired with the fact that the enemy is a giant corporate villain, means that the film feels like a deliberate and delicious middle finger to Donald Trump. However, this diversity would be much more effective if the characters were fully rounded enough for us to actually care about their fate.
With all of the superficial style but none of the rousing spirit of the source material, Fuqua’s film is less The Magnificent Seven, more The Perfunctory Few.