 |
| Denzel Washington and the rest of the Seven |
Director Antoine Fuqua claims to love Westerns; but
how could you remake a classic and not claim such a thing. However, if he is a
fan, then he doesn’t appear to have learned a lot from the films he has
studied.
The
Magnificent Seven doesn’t come anywhere close to the hyperbole of the
title. It is a pale imitation of the John Sturges 1960 version which is itself
based on the superlative Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Full disclosure,
the Sturges version was the first film I ever saw and I am ridiculously attached
to it.
Both the Sturges and the Kurosawa film shared a
plot in that a village which is fed up being plundered by rapacious bandits
scrapes together as much money as they can afford to hire ronin samurai in the
first case, and gunfighters in Sturges’ version. It turns out the money only
stretches to seven warriors but they each have their own quixotic reasons for
signing on.
In the latest version the bad guy is a rapacious
capitalist played by Peter Sarsgaard in a show of cartoon villainy that stops
just short of foaming at the mouth. He wants to effectively buy up a small town
and as a declaration of intent he shoots a few people, sets fire to their
church and says he’ll await their reply.
Their response is for the newly-widowed Haley
Bennet to go in search of a hired gun which she finds, conveniently, in the
shape of Denzel Washington who is just finishing a job in the next town. The
timeline seems odd at this point but it’s one of many such moments so let’s not
go into it right now.
Washington puts together a motley crew including
gambler Chris Pratt, sharpshooter Ethan Hawke, mountain man Vincent D’Onofrio,
and three other characters who in the interests of diversity appear to be a
Korean, a Mexican, and a Native American. I say this because we know next to
nothing about these three characters who only appear to be there so that Fuqua
can claim he’s making a diversity Western.
It’s not really diverse if they are only there,
literally, to make up the numbers is it? I would imagine each of those
characters has an interesting story but we never hear of it, in fact we never
hear about anyone’s reasons or motivations. Unlike the earlier versions there’s
no sense of atonement or honour redeemed by any of them.
This is a by-the-numbers movie. After the first
fight in which Washington and his men take over the town, the stage is set for
a finale in which Sarsgaard hires a small army, hundreds of men, to take the
town back.
The
Magnificent Seven is one of those movies where impossible odds don’t matter.
Each one of the seven has a weapon that can’t miss, each of the bad guys couldn’t
hit the broad side of a barn. Wounds that would be mortal to anyone else are
shrugged off by the good guys who appear borderline invulnerable. Despite all this
the action scenes are very dull. It’s all about violence, there is no sense of
action or excitement.
In terms of influences the film borrows one Steve
McQueen gag and the James Coburn knife-fight from Sturges, and the fortification
of the town from Kurosawa. Nonetheless Fuqua’s direction is heavy-handed. He
lacks the elegance of Kurosawa or indeed the crisp efficiency of the underrated
Sturges. This is the video-game school of directing; how many corpses can you
pile up in the shortest possible time.
The one other steal from Sturges is Elmer
Bernstein’s classic theme. It is used only once, thankfully, and even then in a
fairly muted manner suggesting it’s slightly embarrassed to be there, as well
it might be.
