The Magnificent Seven
2 out of 5 stars
Rated PG-13. Directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, and Lee Byung-hun.
Opens Friday 9/23.
It's solidly constructed bullshit, two-plus hours of personality-free images that will keep your attention until exactly the second the credits roll.
Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent Seven feels about as fresh as a remake of a remake of one of the most imitated — or ripped-off, depending on your mood — movies in film history can feel.
Written by Nic Pizzolato, of True Detective infamy, and Richard Wenk, who did Fuqua's The Equalizer, the film does little-to-nothing to distinguish itself from a century's worth of cinematic Westerns. It does boast an impressive cast, with Denzel Washington, Lee Byung-hun, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Chris Pratt and Peter Sarsgaard drafted to play dress-up on an unrepentantly generic Wild West backlot set.
Unfortunately, with Pizzolato and Wenk's limp script in their mouths and Fuqua's hasty, arrhythmic direction robbing them of, well, anything, from John Ford vistas to Sergio Leone tension to Sam Peckinpah gore, the ensemble cast has little to prop them up except likability.
And machismo. This is a dudely movie (just try to count how many times "man" or "a man" is said in the first 15 minutes), with just enough room for a single woman among the swinging dicks. That woman is Haley Bennett, who acquits herself nicely — that is, she cries well (I guess; I'm not sure what else I can say here) — in a shit role.
I should note that Bennett's character is the one who hires the titular seven men, giving the filmmakers a free pass to give her nothing to do other than complain about not being able to fight with the boys on the front line and get hogtied while a couple of good old MEN conduct men's business right over her head. God, the good old fucking days, huh?
The rest of the movie? You've seen this before and better, from Kurosawa's Seven Samurai — the source material, once you scrape away fifty years of imitation — to Takashi Miike's berserk13 Assassins. Fuqua and company don't have the balls to mount an actual argument about Westerns as a genre, like Quentin Tarantino (of all people!) did with last year's The Hateful Eight, and they don't have the creative rigor to turn these cliches inside out, like S. Craig Zahler did with his brutal, funny Bone Tomahawk.
Instead, they give us Another Western, one with stupidly ornate Pizzolato touches like Chris Pratt trying — and failing — to sell the line "Money for blood's a peculiar business" and endless gunfights that snap between coherent stuntwork and utterly incomprehensible snarls of shitty editing. See if you can map out the first scene, which to the best of my ability I guessed was showing us a horse-drawn carriage — at least one — going from one place to another, though how far apart they were, and how much time was meant to have passed, is entirely anyone's guess.
For some reason, Fuqua and regular DP Mauro Fiore shot on 35 mm film, but between the impatient shot lengths and the deadening color correction, which turns everyone's skin to a deep gold, it's hard to tell. There are a handful of evocative heat-hazy shots, mostly of Washington and Byung-hun, who in a movie stuffed to bursting with effortful masculine squinting has a face that casually commands attention. The rest of it's a jumble.
The film's final act of violence seems to come from a much meaner movie, one that might make something of the inherent tensions in its racial makeup and endless invoking of God and sin. The ship is quickly set back on course with a dose of enervating James Horner brass on the soundtrack and an awful epilogue which appears to have been tacked on with a few minutes in After Effects and a quick voiceover session.
I won't sit here and tell you that The Magnificent Seven is unwatchable. It's solidly constructed bullshit, two-plus hours of personality-free images that will keep your attention until exactly the second the credits roll. Then, as you leave the theater, and as you go home, and as you wake up the next day, they will melt back into the mental ether swirling with the hundred other Westerns you've seen, and in a week you'll have forgotten it ever existed.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2016.