This Western reboot is a solid ‘Seven’
Afrontier town under siege. An army of thugs who leave dead bodies lying in the streets for the townspeople to contemplate. A few bars of familiar Elmer Bernstein theme music playing eerily in the background.
Welcome to Antoine Fuqua’s reboot of the 1960 Western classic, The Magnificent Seven. Intact are the basic parameters of that frontier town — here known as Rose Krick — now beset, not by Eli Wallach and his bandits, but a more ruthless, snakelike opponent: corrupt businessman Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard at his beady-eyed, tongue-flicking best). Bogue wants the townsfolk to accept his “generous” offer of $20 each to turn over their land and scram, or die. (He wants the goldmine sitting at the edge of town.) Also new to town is grieving and vengeful widow Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett), who solicits the help of an out-to-town posse to help protect Rose Krick from the invaders.
This involves weaving together a ragtag band of misfits, frontier drifters who normally only do things for money or selfish motives. We hope to see their male camaraderie grow into something that’s almost noble and chivalrous.
That this premise is sturdy enough for a remake is no surprise: Kurosawa got there first with his classic Seven Samurai in 1954, which cast Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune as, respectively, a battle-weary ronin and a comical imposter hired to protect a farming village from bandits.
Those roles, roughly updated by Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in the 1960 Western, are here taken up by Denzel Washington as bounty hunter Sam Chisholm and Chris Pratt as card-playing prankster Josh Farraday.
That leaves five new faces to round out the seven protectors, and Fuqua covers the ethnographic map here, adding South Korean star Byun Hung-lee as Billy Rocks, partnered with burnt-out Confederate marksman Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke); there’s the elder, bear-like Jack Home (Vincent D’Onofrio) for comic relief and a whiff of old guy wisdom, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mexican outlaw Vasquez, and Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) to show that the Wild West was more ethnically balanced than in previous Hollywood iterations.
Fuqua hits most of the notes pretty well. His new cast is entertaining and engaging, though it’s still basically a sausage party wearing Stetsons. Bennett adds a touch of salt ‘n’ sass as the widow who makes the townspeople cough up cash to hire their protectors, and she handles a rifle better than most of the men in town — even wearing a skirt, and even if she’s pretty much relegated to the background for most of the movie.
Pratt is winning as a gambler who pushes things too far, but always seems to have an ace up his sleeve. His easygoing humor is sorely needed in what sometimes threatens to become a grim proceeding. The other big team-up here is the reuniting of Washington and Hawke, so memorably paired in Fuqua’s Training Day; but here Hawke is a troubled sharpshooter who’s lost his confidence and his aim — like the Robert Vaughan character in the 1960 film, he’s sick of war and has lost his touch with a weapon. Washington, also grim, carries a lot of the film as the black-attired Chisholm, a fair and lethal collector of men who obviously carries some dark demons in his past. (And he’s pretty much nailed the shoot-spin-shoot move that’s so essential to Western showdowns.)
It is good to see more colorful faces in the mix, and Sensmeier’s Comanche amuses during a scene in which he shares a raw deer’s heart with a less-than-appetized Washington. Hung-lee makes the most of his martial arts and sullen stare, relying on an array of fancy knives to do his bidding. Garcia-Rulfo as the Mexican has less to do, and there’s an unfortunate allusion to a tendency toward rape south of the border. (Trump alert!)
As you would expect, a third of the film concerns recruiting the seven men, another third involves training the less-than-eager townspeople to protect themselves, and the final third involves wholesale action as Bogue’s army ride into town.
Fuqua, who’s directed The Replacement Killers as well as Training Day, knows his way around the action genre, and The Magnificent Seven is almost reverential in duplicating some well-recalled shots and sets from the original. But times have changed. Rather than the easy camaraderie of Brynner’s bunch, who could turn lethal in a second but mostly sat around joking and looking cool, Fuqua’s bunch are a serious lot. Sure, there are some fun exchanges, and the cast reportedly enjoyed themselves immensely, firing off Colt .45s and Peacemakers in the Louisiana terrain. But they’re so obviously troubled by their personal black clouds (all except Pratt, it seems) that we sometimes miss the days when Western cinematic heroes weren’t expected to have complicated psychologies or back stories. The script (by True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk) works in a few running gags, but mostly sticks to a solemn tone that makes it less fun than the 1960 original. (Even Kurosawa’s source movie took the time to bask in the black humor of its situation, whether it’s a hungry dog scampering off with a sliced-off hand or the cravenness of the townspeople.) In fact, both the Kurosawa and John Sturges Western harped on the outsider status of its heroes: even when the town is saved, and things are back to normal, these seven know they don’t belong among farmers and regular folk. Their path is rockier, less well-paved.
Fuqua does offer us a coda along these lines, but while the expected bonding does coalesce in the final act, they are less an army of seven than a bunch of guys simply hired to do a job. That some of the seven won’t make it alive to the final credits seems like a given, even if you haven’t seen the original. You’re not likely to shed a lot of tears, though, à la Shane, when they ride out of town. But you will at least be entertained. Call it a solid “7” for this Seven.
