The Magnificent Seven

In The Magnificent Seven, the villain is a cruel capitalist by the name of Bartholomew Bogue, played by Peter Sarsgaard.  In the film's opening (and best) scene, he walks into a church, and offers those inside $20 per parcel of land.  Anyone who refuses his offer will have to answer to his army of men and outlaws, who uphold his tyranny.  He then sets about burning down the church, and shooting down many of the innocent people dead in the street.  It's a fantastic introduction, and sets our hopes high that Sarsgaard will get to play the kind of villain we love to hate.  But then, the movie keeps him off camera for almost the entirety of the movie, until he shows up again during the third act, where he proceeds to do as little as possible.

Okay, I really want to know something.  When did it become commonplace for the villain in action films to become the most forgettable part of the film?  It's a trend I've noticed with disturbing frequency.  Hollywood used to give us villains that were hateful, somewhat sympathetic, sometimes funny, and definitely interesting.  Even if we wanted to see them fall by the end of the film, we were intrigued by them.  These days, villains in action movies tend to maybe get one good scene if they're lucky, and then either do as little as possible, or disappear all together until it's time for the big showdown at the end.  This movie brought this to the forefront of my mind, and I couldn't stop thinking about it while I was watching this remake of the classic 1960 Western, which itself was a remake of the equally classic Akira Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai. 

A big part of this has to do with the fact that The Magnificent Seven gave me little to think about, other than what a prepackaged Hollywood product it was.  Place charismatic actors like Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D'Onofrio together, and then have them attempt to play off each other in a setting that never once looks like a convincing Wild West region, and instead comes across as a really big Hollywood back lot.  This is the latest of the 2016 releases that seems to have been made solely off of the famous name, and not because anyone had any interesting ideas to add to the earlier interpretations.  These kind of movies have been flying out of the studios faster than usual this year, and it's only made things largely a bore at your local theater.  My only hope is that this movie meets the same fate as last month's remake of Ben-Hur (which I refused to spend money on to watch), and is quickly forgotten.

So, after the opening attack on the church, we follow one of the widows of the men who died, Emma Cullen (Hayley Bennett), who decides she wants justice for her husband's murder, and rides into town to seek the aid of bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Washington).  She gives him every piece of money she has to round up a group of men who can take on Bogue's forces.  The group quickly builds to include the likes of drunken sharpshooter Josh Faraday (Pratt), Mexican gangster Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a former Civil War soldier suffering from haunted memories of the battlefield named Goodnight Robicheaux (Hawke), his Asian knife-throwing friend Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), old time tracker Jack Horne (D'Onofrio), and the Comanche outcast Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).

Much of the film is supposed to hang on the chemistry of the actors, but the script does not allow them to have much to work with, so it often looks like we are watching highly paid actors trying to breathe life into what they know are underwritten characters.  All the while, the bombastic and none-too-subtle music score that is mostly provided by the late James Horner (with  Simon Franglen filling in the pieces of the unfinished score)  hammers away, trying to make it sound like this stuff is a lot more exciting than it really is.  Speaking of music, it's curious that the filmmakers wait until the end credits to give us Elmer Bernstein's timeless theme from the earlier movie.  But then, maybe it's because this remake doesn't deserve such memorable musical accompaniment.  This is a largely colorless affair with aimless characters, half-baked interactions and no real sense of tension and consequence for most of its running time.

Even the big shootout at the end is a letdown, and is basically a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.  We get no sense of Bogue's army - How big it is, or the people who are working for him.  They're just faceless extras who exist to be blown away in various, and strangely bloodless and heavily edited PG-13 ways.  That's another thing that bothered me - If ever there was a film that called out for an R-rating, it's this.  I'm not saying some added violence and blood would automatically make this a better movie, but it would at least help not make it seem like such a corporate product that's been market tested to an inch of its life.  The story of The Magnificent Seven is a simple one, and provides ample opportunities for character building, all of which this version ignores at every opportunity.

Nobody looked at this remake as a chance to add onto or perhaps pay tribute to the earlier versions.  My guess the reason it's now playing at your local theater is that decades have passed, and some executives at Sony thought they could make some money off of the name alone.  Not only should it not be seen, but it shouldn't be in theaters in the first place. 

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