Vincent D’Onofrio, Martin Sensmeier, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ethan Hawke, Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Byung-hun Lee (Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures)
If only for the strange, hilarious performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, I would recommend you see this uneven remake of The Magnificent Seven.
Still, it would be better if you could forget about the 1960 film and forget about The Seven Samurai, forget about the classic westerns you’ve seen, and hell, even forget about Quentin Tarantino’s recent revisionist genre exercises.
The movie opens with mining magnate Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) laying waste to the small town of Rose Creek, killing its people and burning down its church. While most of the townspeople cower in fear under the bearded developer, Emma (Haley Bennett) looks for help to protect the town from Bogue’s army.
Help comes in the form of seven guns for hire of varying moral fortitude. Bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (a solid Denzel Washington) is the first to sign up, and he may have personal reasons for doing so. The rest of his team, gambler Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), Confederate sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), and mountain man Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), among others, may be lured by the promise of money, even if it seems like a battle they are bound to lose.
Director Antoine Fuqua, who directed Washington and Hawke in Training Day, maintains a rapport among his motley charges, whose ethnic diversity is neither entirely explained nor generally remarked upon. The closest to racial tension here comes from Faraday, who heckles the Mexican outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) but doesn’t really seem to mean it.
But I wish the expansive Western landscape seen here was as impressive as Quentin Tarantino’s, even in the uneven spectacles of Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Westerns demand breathtaking scenery, and while the landscape is there for the taking in Seven, it doesn’t have the majesty that a great entry of the genre evokes.
What’s magnificent here is D’Onofrio, who has taken on a Wellesian girth that lends his isolated mountain man the air of Falstaff, albeit a Falstaff that speaks a barely intelligible language seemingly known only to him. Could he perhaps sustain this character for a Grizzly Adams reboot?
D’Onofrio’s massive presence isn’t the film’s only Shakespearean element. “We have seen the chimes of midnight,” Robicheax declares, invoking Welles and quoting Henry IV Part 2. A young Hawke once performed in Henry IV as a petulant Hotspur, but as the actor has grown older, he’s lost the callowness that so often made him feel lightweight, his voice now in a deeper register that makes him a more than credible gold-toothed veteran of the War of Northern Aggression.
Sarsgaard’s fey villain isn’t quite creepy enough, and the movie’s climactic shootouts could have been better choreographed. But Fuqua and his cast do a good enough job of investing you in flawed heroes who seem to represent a vision of America that comes together despite its differences to defeat evil. The Magnificent Seven is an okay movie, but there is something magnificent in its sentiment.
The Magnificent Seven
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Written by Richard Wenk and Nic Pizzolatto
With Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio
Rated PG-13 for extended and intense sequences of Western violence, historical smoking, whatever the hell that is, and some language and suggestive material
134 minutes
Opens today at a mutiplex near you.
