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Category: Film (Movies) / Western Films / Film / Arts and Entertainment / Director / Actor

Magnificent Seven remake not all that magnificent

Thursday, 29 Sep 2016 10:49:12

Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt star in Antoine Fuqua's remake of 1960's The Magnificent Seven. (Supplied: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

The new remake of The Magnificent Seven is a streamlined film that's far too eager to spell itself out.

The western genre, you might argue, has always been about black hats and white hats.

But there are filmmakers — John Ford among them — who have taken this apparent simplicity and created masterpieces that articulate America's deep, otherwise inexplicable neuroses around race, colonialism and even gender.

This film tries to do a bit of that, and stumbles.

A re-imagining of John Sturges' 1960 matinee classic — itself closely inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai — it's about a posse of vigilantes who rescue a town from bandits.

This time there's an African-American (Denzel Washington) fronting the film's titular gang, a role made famous by Yul Brynner.

There's also an Asian knife fighter (Lee Byung-hun), a native American warrior who speaks no English (Martin Sensmeier) and a frontier woman (Haley Bennett) who's out to avenge her murdered husband, wearing a series of plunging necklines that suggest — unsubtly — that she's a contemporary badass stuck in a timewarp.

The Magnificent Seven seems tailor-made for audiences used to seeing their heroes travelling in packs — think The Avengers or Suicide Squad — and its upfront diversity is a riposte to #OscarsSoWhite Hollywood.

Yet in many ways the film shoots its own earnestness in the foot.

It's odd, for example, that the frontier town that needs saving is no longer a Mexican village but a dustbowl hamlet of God fearing, WASP settlers.

Stranger still, in a film this progressive, this woke, that they talk about wanting their land back, without the faintest acknowledgement that they, in turn, have stolen it from Native Americans.

The surface politics belie a deep cluelessness.

External Link: The Magnificent Seven Trailer

With a more dialogue driven film, director Antoine Fuqua might have delivered more nuance. His previous action films with Washington, Training Day and The Equalizer, are expanded character studies by comparison.

You see he's trying for some of that detail here, with a hero who eventually confesses a personal motive for his actions, and is, as a consequence, less enigmatic than Yul Brynner was in the original.

As an action director, Fuqua delivers explosive, gruesome violence that's sometimes exciting and often disturbing.

It's all in quotation marks, of course, like we've seen it before: unshaven gunslingers with twitchy trigger fingers and shadowy strangers in the saloon doorway. There are no real surprises.

Nothing in this film compares with the tense standoff in the original, where James Coburn kills a man with a knife and the victim's final look of shock mirrors our own.

Not that the film completely lacks spark (though you won't find it in the smirky presence of Chris Pratt, who provides some ill-timed light relief).

The cast's two biggest oddballs — Ethan Hawke and Vincent D'Onofrio — both have it, and could almost be wearing "keep the western weird" t-shirts.

The former plays a dandy hustler, the latter a gruff outdoorsman, and though they're saddled with some fairly clichéd back stories, neither is as flattened by it as Washington is.

The trouble is, The Magnificent Seven is anything but weird.

It's safe, easily digestible. It's also the kind of film where the bad guy has a prop.

The bandit boss (a clammy, aristocratic Peter Saarsgard) bursts in to the town's small wooden church with a group of henchmen to announce he's taking over the nearby mine.

He's menacingly shaking a small canister of dirt, which he will use as a visual metaphor during this evil mock-sermon. He'll even say the words "America" and "capitalism".

Yes, it's a land grab alright, and he has a cup of dirt to ram home the message.

Like most things in the film, you won't be left wondering. But you might ask yourself why you paid to watch.

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