Nothing Unites Like Revenge and Honor | The Magnificent Seven (2016)

The mighty, maladjusted, and malcontent as unlikely bedfellows.

Dir. Antoine Fuqua

A remake of a remake, The Magnificent Seven is the stuff of cinema legend. The 1960 version directed by John Sturges and starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen is based on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, a classic Japanese film in which poor farmers hire rogue killers to fight a gang of bandits plaguing their village at harvest time. For the Wild West version of events, the trope is reimagined for the dusty New Mexico plains where the townsfolk of Rose Creek find themselves fighting for their land rights against an unscrupulous mining concern headed by playground bully, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard).

The Magnificent Seven is engaging from the start, the impassioned debate among the Rose Creek residents in the church just the first of many dominos that are sent tipping over, setting in motion this revenge-based action drama. Anyone familiar with Kurosawa’s oeuvre knows the fields will be strewn with the bodies of the dead.

As protagonist Sam Chisolm, Denzel Washington reminds the world of the mastery of his craft in this rarified role that dignifies his position as a black man in a white man’s world, a tricky proposition for a film set in the Wild West. It’s a performance that stands in stark contrast to Samuel L. Jackson’s lamentable role in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. As Chisolm, Washington renders an iconic enactment of the cowboy ideal, a fighter for justice and a defender of the downtrodden, like a modern day John Wayne but more deadly on the trigger.

The Magnificent Seven bears a pronounced steampunk vibe with its preoccupation with the explosive technologies of guns and dynamite, kicking things up a notch with a Gatling machine gun that delivers three cartridges of havoc. In terms of visual flair, Fucqua makes a obvious nod to the spaghetti western, with sumptuous visuals that highlight the rugged beauty of the terrain. The bright exteriors are never blown out, the shadowy interiors are never murky, and Denzel’s visage is never unflattering—all a testament to the extent to which cinematographer Mauro Fiore lights every scene with care.

           

The present day team of magnificence has been re-scripted to include a slew of minorities such as Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), Chinese knife expert Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) and Mexican outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Completing the antiheroic bundle are ex-Civil War sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), haunted by the ghosts of dementia and PTSD, and the bearish Jack Horn (Vincent D’Onofrio), quietly out of his mind with high-pitched mumblings that often quote scripture each time he heads out to battle.

Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt) is an inherently likeable rapscallion. While he’s good at heart, he’s not all the way kosher. Emma Cullen (Haley Bennet) presents a strong female presence in a film where most of the women are either mothers or whores hanging out in the background. No shrinking violet, she’s not only the instigator of the plot to hire killers to avenge her husband’s death at the hands of Bogue, she’s first in line to take up arms to defend the town’s land rights.   

For those who wish to wax nostalgic, a tribute is paid to the 1960 film during the closing credits when the classic score by Walter Bernstein plays.