“So far, so good…”
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Written by: Richard Wenk, Nic Pizzolatto
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Haley Bennett, Vincent D’Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard
Swift shot: Several times throughout The Magnificent Seven I found myself conjuring up my favorite quote by Thomas Babington Macaulay, “To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.” To be in the service of the downtrodden and bullied is probably about the most noble cause there is.
Based on the original film Seven Samurai, and the later The Magnificent Seven released in 1960, this modern version covers a wider swath of the American west and shows how it was a more diverse patchwork of colorful people.
Bartholomew Bogue (Sarsgaard) is a criminal land baron who has essentially declared the mining town of Rose Creek his in 1879, Bogue has turned the locals into a town of veritable wage slaves, unable to improve their station in life. And to add insult to injury, he makes them pitiful offers on their land, should they decide to leave for greener pastures. But, if that was all he did, he wouldn’t be much of a bad guy. He also massacres a small group of resisting locals and sets their church ablaze. He tells the locals that he’ll be back for their signatures in three weeks, or else.
Meanwhile in Amador, a bounty hunter named Chisolm (Washington) has tracked his prey to a saloon where he meets Josh Faraday (Pratt) a card-playing, slick shooter. Faraday runs into some trouble of his own when he gets mixed up with Chisolm.
Emma Cullen (Bennett) is now widowed thanks to Bogue, and she has taken all of her savings to Amador to find men she can hire to stand up to Bogue and his henchmen.
From that moment on, the film becomes a team-building series of dramatic and witty montages where we see how each of the “Magnificent Seven” is recruited and find out a bit about each character in the process.
There’s nothing too complex about the story. It’s straight-forward, a lawless man who has endless supplies of gold and weapons has threatened to wipe a town from the developing map of the Wild West.
A group of crazy gun-toting outlaws and bounty hunters agree to help save the town by training the locals to fight for themselves, and then few stand against hundreds! If you’ve heard this story before, I am not surprised, it’s an ageless plot for a reason. It touches on our inner underdog, on the nobility of sacrifice and of standing up for something, even when the odds are tremendously against you.
What makes this film so great is that Fuqua doesn’t hold back on the violence and shows just how brutal the West could be. He uses tremendous cinematography and you definitely get the sense this town could easily be just wiped out. It’s tiny and in the middle of nowhere, and Bogue has complete control over everything! Did I neglect to mention he has a standing order that all the citizens of Rose Creek are to be disarmed? Yepp, easier to massacre folks that way and keep them under your control – when you are the only ones with the guns.
Since this is Fuqua, he was able to get some awesome talent in the film, reuniting Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington under his director’s gaze again. Casting the affable and odd Vincent D’Onofrio was sweet too. Although there were two scenes I felt I wanted to see a nod to Full Metal Jacket, and for whatever reason they didn’t go there. One scene revolves around “right shoulder arms” and he wasn’t even in it, come on, Fuqua! And there is another subtle dig at Full Metal Jacket in a saloon, tell me if you catch it.
With a simple plot, a sense of honor, and plenty of action and drama, The Magnificent Seven will easily go down as this generation’s must-see Western. Only one major beef I have with it, not ONE saloon brawl. What the Fuqua?
