Review of The Magnificent Seven (2016) by Dana F — 09 Jul 2017

I don't want to spend too much time comparing this film to the originals (both the 1960 western and the original original, Kurasawa's 'Seven Samurai'), so suffice it to say that this adaptation is a philosophically and emotionally neutered, though significantly more exciting, remake of those films.

In a nutshell, director Antoine Fuqua converted the original morally ambiguous story into a traditional 'good vs evil' revenge tale and added a shit-ton of stunts, a bloodless hail of bullets, and a ridiculously high body count.

What he did not add was humor, emotion, or pizzazz. The film is silly and even charming in the old Hollywood kind of way... these guys are more than magnificent, they are essentially superheroes, and they never miss a shot.

But old-fashioned charm is not enough to carry it through, it needed some jazzing up for modern audiences, but Fuqua's direction is just ho-hum. The pacing is off and it takes too long to get to the big finale.

It pays off when you get there, but all that lead-in time would have been better spent on developing the septet as a group and/or exploring their individual motivations. As it stands, it's never clear why most of them are even there at all, particularly Chris Pratt's Faraday, whose participation in the whole showdown is truly inexplicable.

All of the characters are painfully underdeveloped - we learn very little about only a few of the Seven, even less about the rest, and nothing about how or why their group has bonded. It makes it hard to care about what happens to them when the inevitable shit goes down.

The main characters are offensively one-dimensional: Denzel Washington's protagonist is a pillar of righteousness, while Peter Sarsgaard's over-the-top villain might as well be twirling his mustache.

At least they had the decency to make the most badass one an Asian dude, which I like to think is a nod to Kurasawa's classic. The action is entertaining and the actors bring some life to it, but it doesn't pack the emotional punch that it clearly seeks, and it's not nearly fun enough.

It is a perfectly okay film, there just isn't anything magnificent about it.