The Magnificent Seven | Little White Lies

The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven

15 Sep 2016 / Released: 17 Sep 2016

A group of men dressed as cowpokes, sitting on a wagon in a rural setting with bushes and trees in the background.
A group of men dressed as cowpokes, sitting on a wagon in a rural setting with bushes and trees in the background.
4

Anticipation.

One of the great actors of our generation stars in his first western. Yes please.

3

Enjoyment.

A really solid, really fun classical shoot ’em up.

3

In Retrospect.

Definitely something deeper to the surface pleasures, but maybe too subtle for impact.

Antoine Fuqua drags the beloved 1960 all-star dad west­ern kick­ing and scream­ing into the 21st century.

Chap­ter Two

Antoine Fuqua has made the best Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en movie. Faint praise, for sure, but there’s a dynamism and a clip here that are miss­ing in the lum­ber­ing 1960 orig­i­nal. That film made a spec­ta­cle of per­son­al­i­ty which felt more impor­tant than the sto­ry itself. It was a tal­ent show­case more than a movie. Yul Bryn­ner and Steve McQueen metaphor­i­cal­ly chest-bump­ing for suprema­cy is a rel­ic from a bygone age, mak­ing their sup­pos­ed­ly self­less heroes look like tough guy pri­ma don­nas. This ver­sion comes with equal­i­ty, and no ego what­so­ev­er. We mere­ly have sev­en actors, each play­ing to their per­son­al strengths.

Chap­ter Three

Any remake of a clas­sic (or at least beloved) movie begs the ques­tion, why now? And often­times, why ever? Instead of rop­ing in a line-up of che­root-chomp­ing A‑listers as in the orig­i­nal, Fuqua’s refit opts for a more racial­ly diverse col­lec­tive. The film can be read as a coali­tion of the will­ing band­ing togeth­er to fight a white oppres­sor, Bogue, here played as a bored and prick­ly brute by Peter Sars­gaard. Maybe the cast­ing has been made for cyn­i­cal rea­sons, so the film might have stronger box office legs in ter­ri­to­ries beyond the US. Or it might be a state­ment on com­bat­ting the wave of xeno­pho­bia that has swept over the west­ern world. Fuqua him­self has said that this was not intend­ed as a polit­i­cal film, and it comes across that way. He doesn’t push the mate­r­i­al for rel­e­vance”. Because of that, the film’s alle­gor­i­cal poten­tial is that much richer.

Chap­ter Four

The film is most potent as an expres­sion of the part played by reli­gion in Amer­i­can life. Dur­ing its pro­logue, Bogue and his men inter­rupt a church meet­ing in which the denizens of south­ern min­ing town of Rose Creek dis­cuss options to avert a hos­tile takeover. It’s all for naught, as Bogue employs crooked maths to draw the line between aggres­sive, anti-human­ist cap­i­tal­ist takeover and our Lord and pro­tec­tor. He duly usurps the meet­ing and torch­es the build­ing. As a final insult, the bell drops from the tow­er, sig­nalling the death of hope. Pri­or to the cli­mac­tic bat­tle, in which the sev­en prove that grass roots col­lec­tive pow­er can over­come mass aggres­sion, a point is made of rein­stat­ing the bell as a sym­bol of God’s return to the town as an unseen protector.

Chap­ter Five

For bet­ter and worse, there are hints of par­o­dy and gener­ic appro­pri­a­tion in this retooled Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en. Fuqua makes Rose Creek come across as a com­i­cal­ly stan­dard­ised wild west­ern burg, even down to the under­tak­er being the first omi­nous sight you see upon mosey­ing into town. There’s the cen­tral byway, the bar, the jail, the office, the mer­can­tile. It all feels too famil­iar, like no thought has gone into updat­ing the geog­ra­phy of the loca­tion. A Comanche brave named Red Har­vest (Mar­tin Sens­meier) takes a spot on the rooftops, fir­ing arrows down­wards as evil mer­ce­nar­ies sluice into their trap. Washington’s Sam Chisum is point man, his dare­dev­il stunt work and fan­cy shoot­ing style both feel­ing might­i­ly rote. Famil­iar­i­ty breeds con­tempt, and see­ing the same two-horse town as the stage for high dra­ma cer­tain­ly dimin­ish­es the thrill.

Chap­ter Six

Haley Ben­net plays the film’s sole female char­ac­ter, an aveng­ing straw­ber­ry blonde angel named Emma Cullen. She wants to be part of the sev­en, but her gen­der dis­al­lows it. Where the sev­en may be able to look beyond racial and cul­tur­al divi­sions at the ser­vice of the greater good, women don’t fit that equa­tion. There’s a shot where she is seen mourn­ing her mur­dered hus­band, lean­ing over his fresh corpse. Cullen is wear­ing a very low-cut muslin top, her ample cleav­age (rather than her anguished expres­sion) is cen­tre frame. It’s a sim­i­lar case in most of the scenes she’s in.

Chris Pratt’s wise­crack­ing card sharp, Josh Fara­day, even makes a point that, if she’s real­ly inter­est­ed in killing, then she’ll need to start wear­ing trousers. She’s handy with a rifle, but that’s the extent of her par­tic­i­pa­tion. We nev­er see her save any­one, and the moment she gets into a spot of both­er, some­one else swings in to res­cue her. Per­haps Fuqua and writ­ers Richard Wenk and Nic Piz­zo­lat­to want to remain hon­est about woman being treat­ed as sec­ond class cit­i­zens in the fron­tier days. Yet her sex­u­alised damsel sta­tus is unfor­tu­nate, one of the more irk­some throw­backs to 1960s attitudes.

Chap­ter Sev­en

As an exam­ple of clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood con­struc­tion, The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en does the job. The cast­ing is spot on, and with very lit­tle effort, Fuqua man­ages to cre­ate a set of rich char­ac­ters with mean­ing­ful back sto­ries. The orig­i­nal was first and fore­most a block­buster, and this new ver­sion strives for the same goal. It also works as an inter­est­ing exam­ple of how the now cul­tur­al­ly ubiq­ui­tous super­hero genre may have had its roots in the west­ern. It like­ly won’t go down as one of Washington’s vin­tage per­for­mances, but he does what he needs to do for the job at hand. His bushy mous­tache and side­burn com­bo, plus head-to-toe black trim­mings, even lend the film the faint per­fume of the blax­ploita­tion genre. No wag­on wheels are being rein­vent­ed here, and there ain’t noth­ing wrong with that.

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