I should hate this movie on principle, I really should. It’s everything I usually bitch about. It’s a remake that they used big box office funds on big name celebrities and flashy visuals…. except it didn’t. Not really. Sure, it has a huge cast, which we’ll go over later, and some beautiful shots of an Old West looking area, but the effects at least looked practical. Was this better that the Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen version? Did it hold a candle to the Akira Kurosawa masterpiece? Yes… and no… and that’s an impossible question to answer. Allow me to explain.
Just like with my Future Flicks podcast, (that you’re all totally listening to, right?) I’ll start with the impressive cast and then not even attempt to be smooth and not even consider using a segue to move from one topic to the next. So here we go.
This film stars Denzel Washington (Training Day), Chris Pratt (Jurassic World), Ethan Hawke (Training Day), Vincent D’Onofrio (Daredevil), Byug-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Y Tu Mama Tambien), Haley Bennett (Hardcore Henry), and Peter Sarsgaard (Orphan)
The acting was good but there wasn’t enough story for any one actor to really sink their teeth in. Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio’s characters got the most from the story and actually showed some growth but the others just read their lines and existed on the screen. That’s not too challenging for actors of this caliber. The odd thing is that if they had been crappy actors that would have shown but when a character stays stagnant it’s harder to showcase how good someone is. But then again, was this ever the type of movie that had huge character development scenes that Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen could steal the show? Or was this always a fun to watch movie with a captivating plot? Think back to Seven Samurai? How many of those characters got much love outside of their one defining moment in the film? So here’s the tl;dr version of this paragraph: Having such a great ensemble cast makes me feel like something is off. Seeing an actor as great as Denzel Washington be one dimensional for the the better part of a whole film just feels wrong. That doesn’t mean the acting was bad, it’s just that the writing didn’t cater to big dramatic scenes.
This was a dangerous movie to do. A very dangerous movie. Seven Samurai is a cinematic masterpiece. The Magnificent Seven (1960) was a great film though it’s judged harshly by some who see it as a Kurosawa rip-off as opposed to an homage. So this one could easily have been a soulless Hollywood remake with money and big names thrown at it. Luckily for the movie going public, the powers-that-be in the movie making biz had Nic Pizzolatto who wrote True Detective and Richard Wenk who wrote The Equalizer and The Mechanic pen the script and put the amazing Antoine Fuqua behind the camera. Who’s Antoine Fuqua, you may ask? You know his work. He’s worked on such classics as Training Day, Shooter, and Southpaw. This movie had all the right pieces come together in just the right way to make a solid flick.
Fuqua has a certain way with his movies where he’s able to make them larger than life while keeping them gritty and grounded. Was anyone in the Wild West as good of a shot as any one of those seven guys were? Probably not. Did real cowboys have plot armor? Nope. But The Magnificent Seven never felt fantastical. It stayed close to the source material but it strayed just enough to keep things interesting. No matter who writes, directs, or acts in a movie, if it’s entirely predictable it’s going to take a lot of the fun out of it.
Movies in this modern era tend to over do it with the visuals at times and it can detract from the film as a whole if more thought is put into flashy CG than into the writing or acting. I’m happy to say that The Magnificent Seven suffered from no such problem. From what I could tell, most of the effects were practical except for some of the more impossible stunts, and there was nothing too flashy or out of place. Nothing to mess with the illusion that this really took place in the Wild Wild West, Jim West, Desperado… sorry, sometimes I just break into Will Smith songs, don’t you?
With a glance at my watch it’s time to bitch! There are very few perfect movies out there which means that no matter how much I like something, I can find something to complain about. So here we go. There were parts of this movie that were too predictable, and not just because this is a remake. Some of the newer elements were predictable and there was one that bothered me more than others. In an effort to avoid spoilers I’ll just say that it could have been a really great scene in the movie BUT there was no build up to it so the payoff didn’t feel earned. The foreshadowing was also pretty heavy in certain parts and so much so that during the finale when they were trying to be subtle about something, all the subtlety was lost because of one line of dialogue earlier in the film that was delivered just right.
When the credits rolled there had been more positives than negatives so I walked away with a smile on my face. The two things I listed in the above paragraph were really the only problems I had. The complaining I did about the character development I did earlier didn’t detract from the movie as much as it pointed out a general flaw in this type of film.
The Magnificent Seven is a remake of a movie that copied another movie and you know what? It was pretty damn… wait for it… magnificent. If you get a chance to see it in theaters, watch it, it was well worth it.