52 Time October 3, 2016
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There are aT leasT seven reasons To remake
The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges’ larkish 1960 western,
itself a retooling of Akira Kurosawa’s rousingly elegant 1954
epicSeven Samurai: at any given time, there are always at
least seven young-to-middle-aged male actors ready to strap
on holsters and peer out from beneath rakishly tilted cowboy
hats. Because really, what could be cooler?
But Antoine Fuqua’s newMagnificent Seven—in which
Denzel Washington’s bounty hunter Sam Chisolm leads a
septet of mercenaries after a greedy mining magnate bent
on destroying a town—is cool only in the most strained,
trying-too-hard way. Which means it isn’t cool at all. And if
the best westerns have always been, in some way, studies of
contemporary manhood, it’s worrisome to think about what
thisMagnificent Seven says about men today.
Whatever’s wrong with the picture isn’t necessarily
the fault of the cast, which includes Ethan Hawke as a
haunted former Confederate soldier, Chris Pratt as a
waggish gunslinger and, best of all, Vincent D’Onofrio as a
grizzled iconoclast who’s a cross between Santa andChimes
at Midnight–era Orson Welles. Byung-hun Lee, Manuel
Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier round out the group
as, respectively, an Asian guy who throws a mean knife, a
Mexican bandit on the run and a Comanche who doesn’t need
a gun (or hat) to prove himself as a fighter. Even if none of
them emerge distinctly, Fuqua is at least reaching toward the
idea that the very people America has typically shut out often
embody its finest values. (And it’s never mentioned that the
seven’s leader is a man of color. Because why should it be?)
As Chisolm, Washington
grinds away at the movie’s
spirit with his dull nobility.
He’s often a marvelous
actor, in performances
ranging from teasingly sly
to stonily grave, but here,
he’s so unreproachfully
earnest that the movie sags
around him. It doesn’t help
that the story line gives
Chisolm clear motivation for
wanting to go after the villain,
played by a lizard-like Peter
Sarsgaard. Washington’s
character is a world apart
from Yul Brynner’s in the
original, who takes the gig
for no reason other than the
challenge, only to dig into it
wholeheartedly on principle,
a kind of heroism whose very
casualness gives it meaning.The heroismof this
Magnificent Seven is actually
more conservative than that
of most 1950s or early ’60s
westerns: even when dead
bodies start piling up, we
don’t really see how much
the blind bravery of these
men costs them—it’s simply
what’s expected of them. The
picture is action-packed but
mindlessly so, and it’s neither
light enough to work as a
coltish entertainment nor
smart enough to cut beyond
anything but the most rote
notions of masculinity. The
final showdown is elaborate
and raggedly violent,
without being rousing. We
know something’s at stake
because we’ve been told
so repeatedly—only it’s all
too easy to forget what that
something is. Retooling the
western for the modern age,
Fuqua has drained away
everything that made classic
westerns classic in the first
place. His magnificent seven
are merely so-so, a bunch of
dudes we settle for with a
sigh, as if it were our fault for
expecting more. •Denzel and friends
try to bring the
western into the
modern ageMOVIES
Once coolMagnificent Seven
now a middling septet
By Stephanie Zacharek
PREVIOUS
MAGNIFICENCE
In the originalMagnificent
Seven (1960), Yul Brynner,
below, led an ace cast
including Steve McQueen
and Charles Bronson
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