Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven has a gatling gun, a dynamite-torn church, and Denzel Washington on a horse. It should not feel this tired.
Trailer, via HD Retro Trailers.
Rose Creek Burns First
The setup lands fast. In 1879, gold tycoon Bartholomew Bogue, played by Peter Sarsgaard, seizes the frontier town of Rose Creek. He forces the residents into cheap labor at his mine and poisons their water. When they object, he torches their church and murders several townsfolk in public, including farmer Matthew Cullen. Bogue gives the survivors three weeks to hand over their deeds.
Matthew’s widow Emma, played by Haley Bennett, rides out with her friend Teddy to hire guns. She lands Sam Chisolm, a Wichita bounty hunter with a personal interest in Bogue. Chisolm recruits six more: gambler Joshua Faraday (Chris Pratt), outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), former Confederate sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), assassin Billy Rocks (Lee Byung-hun), mountain man Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), and Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).
That is the film. Seven men, one town, a week to fortify before Bogue’s army arrives.
Fuqua Casts Against the Grain
The best thing here is the casting, and Fuqua fought for it. He told studio executives the actors they floated were all white, and he wanted a different picture. He built one, with Washington, Lee and Garcia-Rulfo in the lineup and Bennett as a female lead who does not fold into a type.
Fuqua framed the choice as history, not revision. “There were a lot of black cowboys, a lot of Native Americans; Asians working on the railroads,” he said. “The truth of the West is more modern than the movies have been.”
Washington had never made a Western. He grew up on biblical films — King of Kings, The Ten Commandments — because his father, a Church of God in Christ minister, did not allow trips to the movies. He skipped the 1960 Magnificent Seven on purpose, though he had seen Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
The Score Outlives the Story
James Horner died in 2015 after composing part of the music. His friend Simon Franglen finished it. It was Horner’s last film, and the score is the element that holds up.
The rest does not. Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk wrote a screenplay that moves through its beats without finding much inside them. The action is competent. The story is thin. Reviewers split on it, and the split is fair.
Shot north of Baton Rouge starting May 18, 2015, and opened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2016, before a September 23 wide release, The Magnificent Seven cost $90 million and made $162 million worldwide. That is a moderate return, not a triumph.
Here is the verdict. The Magnificent Seven is a remake of a remake, and it plays like one — a diverse, well-cast, well-scored film that never decides what it wants to say beyond the tagline. “Justice has a number.” The number is seven, and the film spends 132 minutes counting them down without much to add. Fuqua’s casting argument is the most interesting idea in the movie, and it lives in interviews rather than on screen. That is the disappointment. You can see the better film in the casting notes.
The Magnificent Seven
– Runtime: 132 minutes
– Release: September 23, 2016 (US)
– Budget: $90 million
– Worldwide gross: $162 million
– Metacritic: 54/100
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
