★★☆
It’s got the cast. It’s got the setting. It’s got an Oscar-winning actor/director team and a story that has captured generations of audiences time and time again. So why is it that this remake of a remake lacks the titular magnificence?
In the Wild West frontier of America, mining magnate Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) takes what he pleases. When he plans to forcefully evict a town of colonists, they turn to the only help they can find – rogue warrant officer Sam Chisholm (Denzel Washington) and any muscle he can rustle up.
The screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto (of True Detective fame) and Richard Wenk claims its heritage in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai, but takes only the core conceit of that film on board. Its greatest achievement is in casting, with an African-American man at front and centre, a character on whom no one casts racial aspersions. A true oddity for a Western, perhaps, but a welcome one.
Our seven are a diverse bunch, including knife-throwing badass Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee) and Comanche initiate Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier). By the by, how refreshing is it that a Native American role is actually filled by a Native American actor? Mexican Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) cops the racist banter, generally direct from the mouth of gunslinging card-shark Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), but it comes across as innocent enough.
The rest is spit and polish, with little true soul. Clocking in at 133 minutes, Pizzolatto and Fuqua still fail to effectively develop their cast of characters in time for us to care about their fates. They exist as sketches – believable and fun, but hardly complex. Pratt’s Faraday, for example, is too similar to his “charming rogue” turns in other summer blockbusters, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s oddball trapper proves again that the esteemed character actor has seen better days. Bogue’s motivations for murder are less grounded, his mannerisms cartoonish. The irony is that all of the titular swords-for-hire from Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins (another adaptation of the same story) felt more rounded and captivating, despite there being a lot more of them.
Once Bogue’s army finally shows up and the action kicks in, there’s a half-hour of competent action. Every choice feels safe: it’s worth reiterating that this is a remake of a remake that broke with convention and laid the foundations of a genre. For Fuqua to lowball it and create such a forgettable theme-park western is a shame, given that Kurosawa’s name still graces the credits.
It’s the last two minutes in particular that nearly break the film, with a finale that features horrible, unnecessary narration, the theme music from the original and a grotesque shoe-horning in of the title. It should never have made the cut.
Fuqua’s latest is no Southpaw, thankfully, but never adds up to the sum of its parts. It succeeds only as popcorn fare – satisfying while it lasts, but soon forgotten, and far from magnificent.
