‘The Magnificent Seven'
Remake of the classic Western not so great
It's the little things that screw up a movie, along with all the big things. In the starry, hollow remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” the gambling rogue played by Chris Pratt is introduced by a gunslinging trick he calls “the incredible disappearing ear.” It's just a cheap, violent sight gag, but it leaves a lousy aftertaste. So “magnificent” is a joke, too?
Not exactly, but this movie's all over the place, trying too hard to be all Westerns to all sensibilities. Director Antoine Fuqua of “Training Day” and “The Equalizer” reunites here with his star of those two pictures, Denzel Washington. His character Sam Chisolm is a bounty hunter with a secret, a quick draw and a nifty bolero. The time: 1879. The town: Rose Creek, whose citizens are being ripped off and wiped out by the robber baron portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard, whose sweaty, venal performance would be twice ... as effective if his ... theatrical pauses were half as ... long.
Time for a cleanup crew! In they ride, these seven, reflecting the full multiethnic diversity of the Old West. In largely nonverbal context, Byung-Hun Lee is Billy Rocks, who's a whiz with blades. Martin Sensmeier is the Comanche warrior Red Harvest, a pip with a bow and arrow. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo's Vasquez enjoys his gunfights and how.
In a more verbose category of magnificence, they're joined by Jack Horne, a trapper who resembles a bear, and a fairly droll oddball in Vincent D'Onofrio's hands; every new killing comes equipped with an appropriate biblical verse. Beardwise, the most compelling performance is delivered by Ethan Hawke, who has, at least, something to play beyond the facial hair in the role of ex-Confederate sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux, who's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The condition comes and goes, depending on the needs of the screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) and Richard Wenk (“The Equalizer,” “The Mechanic”).
In the 1960 version starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn played the corollary role of the Hawke gunfighter. That film, itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's massive international hit “Seven Samurai” (1954), seems like a long time ago now. Fuqua's remake has its moments: Some of the straightforward action is pretty slick, and it's certainly great to hear a newly orchestrated rendition of the Elmer Bernstein theme under the closing credits. But the gathering of the seven, which was the heart of the Kurosawa classic, counts for zilch in this version. The movie may take death seriously in the final chapters of a very simple story, but getting there it's mostly anonymous, frenzied mayhem, in between jokes, so the emotional compass never settles any which way. Usually Washington's charisma is enough to see him through a problematic genre exercise. Here, I suspect, we have a movie that'll split audiences between responses of “not bad” and “not good enough.”
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